External Media Players: Music Assistant is Broken, what are some alternatives?

After losing Music Assistant on my HA instance (it just crashes over and over again), I’m now trying to figure out how to utilize my two external RPi3 PiCore players. I can no longer stream spotify to them. Music Assistant used to handle this.

I’ve uninstalled Music Assistant and I have the Squeezebox integration installed, which sees both PiCore players, but there’s no option to browse Spotify in the Media link.

How do I get Spotify sent to these devices?

I recall that I used to need to have LMS installed on the PiCore player, but I also recall reading somewhere that the LMS function is now integrated into HA? If not, what’s the solution for that, as there doesn’t seem to be a way to install the Spotify plugin on the PiCore players without installing the LMS on each PiCore player…which isn’t working for some reason.

Any ideas?

You need LMS to be set up on a device. This will act as the head unit; where you can set up,Spotify Tidal music libraries etc. It will then stream to the other two piCorePlayers as they are recognised as “headless” players. They need squeezelite to ne switched on through the PCP interface. (You have already done that as HA is also picking them up)

The question is do you install LMS in HA or on a standalone dedicated RPI. I am stand-alone because PiCorePlayer (PCP) makes it easy and is stable. I have a large library which is curated and lossless and dedicated for audio. Material skin add on is a great interface. I use an ipanel to allow HA to display my music page (local network only).

There is a dedicated discussion on LMS on this forum. PCP has their own how to. And there is a dedicated LMS forum. Good luck

I don’t have any media. I only use Spotify. Even with LMS installed on PiCore with the Spotty plugin, how do I use HA’s front end to select Spotify music and choose a picore player?

Hmm…it seems that HA only picks up the players if I point the players to HA as the LMS server, at which point the local LMS doesn’t detect a player anymore.

This seems all way too complicated and clunky just to play music. I can’t imagine any non-tinkering hobbyist being able to figure this stuff out. I’m patient enough to figure it out, but man, it’s not friendly at all.

You can install LMS on HA. LMS does Spotify. Or as I said above you can use an iframe if LMS is outside of HA.

There is another

I am afraid I don’t understand. You don’t pinpoint the players at anything. If Squeezelite is set up they are discoverable on the local network.

Sonos?

Alternatively use Bluetooth on each headless player and stream from your phone