Using a constellation of a few scripts, automations, dashboard cards, and helpers, I created a little player within Home Assistant that allows me to type in the name of a song, artist, or album into custom card and send that info to any Amazon Echo player or group as a text phrase and have it play that. This is especially cool since Amazon treats groups as individual players, and it handles all of the device synchronization. So I can play to one device, or multiple devices as long as I’ve set them up as a group within the Alexa app. I can also easily switch to different devices or groups. Since it is not immediately easy to just send a link for it to play or stream directly from Home Assistant to the speaker, I got around that by creating automations that targets any specific echo, I choose and takes my input and sends it as text to speech input to that echo–something like, "play the album parachutes by Coldplay on the living room echo, or “move music to the everywhere group.” I also created pause and play in shuttle commands in the same manner.
I’ve also been able to create a “recently played” list. Basically, it is a script that monitors all the playing of all the echoes in my setup, adds them to a list that is manipulated and displayed in a card on the dashboard. There are some de-duplication magic that I worked in there, and the added benefit to this is that it displays any recently played songs on my echoes, regardless of how they originated. And since the Alexa media player integration allows me to monitor whatever is playing on any echo at any moment, I immediately get to see what is playing and control it using media player card. Unfortunately, I can’t control scrubbing. I had to create standardized lists of my echos with standardized names, but that was a minor correction. And I did not have to obtain any additional device authorization or create an Alexa skill other than having to enable the Apple Music skill inside Alexa.
On top of that, I created a shortcut for Apple Music that allows me to send artist, song, or album information from the Apple music app to this applet in Home Assistant and then automatically start playing it. So I have the ability to browse Apple Music on my iPhone or Mac, and then using the share sheet and the shortcut, have it automatically start playing on any echo I choose.
It’s not perfect, and the song names and albums are sometimes not standardized enough to be able to do this perfectly every time. But it generally works enough to be useful to me (in my experience, about 99% of the time).
I bring this up because I think this is a novel way of engaging with an echo that is already fully authenticated. And I was wondering, is this something that music assistant could add? Since they already have the ability to browse music and get information about song titles and artists and albums, could it not be set up where, if we chose an Alexa device to stream to, music assistant, instead of sending a link or streaming directly, would just send a text to speech command to the chosen Alexa, device or group, and then monitor that device to display what is actually currently playing?
I know this is somewhat different from how music assistant works for other remote speakers, since it’s able to stream directly to them and control the stream within the app. But if we could make this happen within music assistant, I think this is a reasonable workaround given Amazon’s current and seemingly ongoing restrictions.
I’d be happy to help with this if this is something that the music of assistant folks would be willing to pursue.
I did post this in the music assistant git hub feature request discussion list. But I thought reposting here could bring more genius minds into this and maybe help gain traction for it by reaching a broader audience of people who might be interested.
