I currently have old school speakers connected to a bluetooth dongle to play audio. I plan to connect a Voice PE to the speakers to be able to stream audio from Music Assistant. How would I be able to continue to play audio from my phone using Bluetooth? Is it correct that Voice PE does not support A2DP? If so, what other options are there to ‘inject’ Bluetooth audio into Music Assistant for playback over speakers via Voice PE? Is piCorePlayer set up as a music provider possible and/or overkill?
No Bluetooth is not active on the device for sound. There’s posts related to why. I believe it had to do with what they’re doing with the radios… There is a 3.5mm jack.
yes, I plan on using that 3.5mm jack to connect the speakers that are currently connected to the Bluetooth dongle. Once I make that switch, I will lose the Bluetooth dongle functionality and I am trying to figure out how to be able to play audio from a phone (or other device) over music assistant
If the device is connected to speakers you tell music assistant to play to the device from your phone. And it plays… It’s casting direct from MA to the device and your phone is just controlling the action.
This is the HA companion app running Music Assistant targeting the Music Assistant player (ma sets up special entities) for my living room wired to one of my Denon receiver inputs through the 3.5.
You assign media, hit play. That’s it. (or in my case I ask the LLM to play Yacht Rock in the living room)
In my scenario I would want to play audio that originates from the phone, not from MA, e.g. a YouTube video playing on the phone. I can currently play this from the phone via bluetooth dongle to the speakers. Once the Voice PE is connected to the speakers via 3.5mm jack, how would I stream phone audio to the speakers?
That’s entirely up tk your speakers at that point this isn’t a ha problem.
You said does vpe do Bluetooth no it doesn’t you need a separate dongke for they it has a 3.5. You’re free to hook a bt dongke to that 3.5 if you wish but personally I’m not hooking speakers to a VPE ‘temporarily’ that’s permanent. I’d be using different speakers.
Your phone playing independent to a bt speaker has nothing to do wit it it’s the same as ijf any other device wanted to use the speaker.
Your fundamental issue is you do t cast to a ha device like that from YouTube. You’d have to solve that first
Agree, I view it as a permanent connection and that it why I am concerned about loosing the ability to stream audio from my phone. Considering the complexity/customization of MA I was wondering if there is a way to inject audio from a Bluetooth source into MA?
Would it be possible to instead use a piCorePlayer in standalone player mode (https://www.picoreplayer.org/landingzone_option1.html) and set it up as a squeezelite player provider in order to stream from MA? In addition, piCorePlayer should then also be able to accept Blutooth audio from phones, etc.
Frankly (and I don’t mean to burst your bubble)
You’re going to have a very hard time with that use case. I do not know a way to make MA a target for streaming by audio. I do not believe it possible without writing your own BT>> ma source integration. And there’s a reason nobody has written it yet. Your YouTube scenario is very one-off. Heck they even support YouTube music but don’t do that…
I know I’m not you but if I were in your shoes.
And ABSOLUTELY MUST use this speaker for both… I’d be looking for a different driver for those speakers than the single bt receiver.
or accept it only connects to one thing. Thats your complication. Maybe some kind of device that’s wired AND accepts a bt and autoswitcbes would be what I’d be looking for.
I gave piCorePlayer a try after realizing I had a spare Pi 3 B.
- Flashed piCorePlayer to microSD
- Enabled squeezelite in picoreplayer and set up squeezelite as a player provider in MA → Audio playback from MA to speaker output on Pi worked right away (replicating Voice PE playback function through 3.5mm jack)
- Enabled built-in Bluetooth and paired phone to piCorePlayer
- Playback from MA and from paired Bluetooth source work (even simultaneously
)
I might add a USB DAC HAT onto the Pi for better audio quality but stock sounds ok for now
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