In my case, media_player.join throws no errors and appears to group the speakers. However, in reality, nothing happens. The speakers are still independant, the native app shows no grouping and Home Assistant no longer sees them. They all just become “unavailable”.
…Are You Shpongled? 
I hope I’m in the right place!?!
Since LinkPlay was integrated into HA, the media player does not provide the “media_content_id” attribute. Why?
I had wanted to move away from Google hardware for a while, and after Google broke everyone’s Chromecast audio devices this week (and all my whole-house music automations), I decided it was finally time to move to something else.
I settled on Wiim Minis, and after many hours of setup, I’ve got nearly everything working as before (although disappointingly, volume changes aren’t as fast as with Chromecast, and sometimes when I play and pause rapidly, you’ll get weird breaks in the music as it starts up again.
That said, Chromecast was a mess and required all kinds of workarounds to make it work as expected.
Although the Wiim Minis also required some workaround, like creating helper groups to adjust the volume and installing the custom SpotifyPlus integration to set Spotify’s Source to a speaker group I created with the Wiim app.
I also look forward to the official Linkplay integration getting some much-needed love. Given how the grouping functionality is broken (and how I had to work around that), it doesn’t seem like it was ready to be made official.
I recently moved over from OpenHAB and needed more functionality in the linkplay integration - so I ported/reimplemented the LinkPlay binding I wrote for OpenHAB as a HACS integration with the help of Cursor AI - the implementation is ready for more testing. See GitHub - mjcumming/wiim: WiiM (LinkPlay) Home Assistant Integration
Just installed the integration and tested it with my linkplay speakers and Wiim devices. It’s working flawlessly so far and feels noticeably snappier than the official integration on my setup. The additional entities are also really handy. The only thing I haven’t been able to get working is the album art, but that’s no big deal since I can pull it in via the DLNA integration. Thanks so much for releasing this!
Thank you! Instantly worked and recognized my WiiM with Qobuz connected to it unlike the official integration. Album art shows as well! But it’s a bit strange…
It doesn’t seem to sync states properly, at least for Qobuz Connect. It will show the source correctly, album art, song, etc. but it will only briefly (for one second) go into a Playing state when a new song begins, and then right back to Idle. It continue to show the album art, name, details, etc. but just the wrong state.
It seems like the mapping to catch this properly was updated in python-linkplay v0.2.9 – is it possible to update the integration to use that (or a newer) version by chance?
(I added an entry in GitHub, figured that may be easier - thanks in advance!)
Thank you!
Album art should be working - any errors? which device?
Try the .3 release - this integration does not rely on the existing python library.
The devices are older models of audio pro speakers (C3, C5, C10) which use an outdated linkplay chip that only supports HTTP. I’m still using the old, unofficial integration, which regularly throws various errors making troubleshooting a bit difficult.
Interference could also be a factor, as I’m currently running both integrations in parallel. That said, the error message “Error retrieving proxied image” does appear to be a relevant match.
My understanding is some older device also don’t tolerate more than one HTTP connection - are you able to turn on debug logging and then submit this to github issues.