Current setup: my hifi system and chromecast audio are behind a smart plug. When turning it on the hifi receiver changes to the channel of the chromecast audio.
My plan: I want home assistant to automatically connect Spotify to the CC Audio and play a certain Playlist. However via the Spotify integration in home assistant I can only see my cc audio if I connected Spotify to the cc via my smartphone before hand. The integration can’t find it on its own so to say.
Is there a way to solve this?
I will bump up this subject, because this is also my plan: I run a dental office and I want to automatically start spotify to auto start a playlist to a certain group of chromcast devices. Any progress in this subject?
I found a really nice solution and also stepped up the audio system.
First the initial solution:
For automatic connection and playing to my chromecast someone on reddit pointed me to spotcast which pretty much solves the problem. I also added a node red automation that is triggered when the smart plug behind my sound system is turned on. My GF and I both get an actionable notification for 15 seconds asking both of us which playlis should be played, mine, my GF’s or a playlist we setup and feed together. If noone chooses a playlist within 15 seconds, our playlist will be played automatically.
The step up:
I always wanted to do multi room audio and finally found the time to set it up. Since chromecast audios are no longer produced, are very hard to get hands on and can only be grouped with other chromecast devices, I changed the setup significantly.
I had a couple of raspberry pis lying around (a rpi zero & rpi 3) and also an old phone, so I went with snapcast. You will find a couple of tutorials on how to setup multiroom audio on home assistant with snapcast and mopidy, I happened to find out that mopidy is not for me since you can’t control mopidy from your spotify phone app. So I use snapcast and librespot which makes my raspberry pi that is running home assistant a spotify connect device and it is also the snapcast server. (I found this hass-addon repository that makes the setup pretty easy) I switched my chromecast audio for a raspi with a hifiberry DAC+ HAT and setup my other raspi and my spare phone with some speakers in my kitchen and bathroom, all running the snapcast client service/app. Now in my spotify app I can choose to stream to my multiroom setup and in home assistant I can choose in which room to play musik and also how loud.
I am quite satisfied with this new setup already as I am able to use the spotcast HACS integration for my multiroom setup too.