I’m excited to share HOMEii Flow — a full app-like music experience for smart home dashboards.
I built it to make music control feel less like a basic control card and more like a real music app: visual, touch-friendly, clean, and useful on phones, tablets, wall panels, and dashboards.
One of the key ideas is that the device you’re using can also become the player — so a wall tablet or browser device can be part of the music experience, not just a remote control.
This has been a long-running project with a lot of UX thinking and iteration. Codex helped with the implementation, but the product direction, testing, and polishing were done through a long hands-on process.
I’d really love to hear your thoughts and feedback — both on the overall idea and on the actual user experience. What feels useful? What would you improve? What would make it better as a daily music dashboard?
This is a small but important usability fix for users who manage the card settings from the in-card UI.
In UI settings mode, the Settings button now always stays available in the main bar and cannot be accidentally removed from the bar selector. This prevents the situation where the card is set to UI mode but there is no easy way to open the settings screen again.
Changes:
Settings is always visible in UI / in-card settings mode.
Settings is locked in the in-card main bar selector.
Editor tags were refreshed so Home Assistant loads the updated editor after upgrade.
Update through HACS to version 5.1.6.
After updating, a hard browser refresh is recommended if the old behavior is still cached.
One of the best things about HOMEii Flow is that you don’t need to write a single line of code. Just install the card, and it will automatically detect your Music Assistant entities and set everything up for you.
Want to customize it? Use the built-in Visual Editor to tweak the design, colors, and features with zero YAML knowledge.
HOMEii Flow 5.2.0 Released - A Music Assistant Dashboard Card for Home Assistant
Hi everyone,
I’m happy to share the new HOMEii Flow 5.2.0 release.
HOMEii Flow is a custom Home Assistant dashboard card built for Music Assistant. The goal is to make music control feel less like a technical dashboard widget and more like a polished music app inside Home Assistant, especially for wall tablets, mobile devices, RTL/Hebrew homes, and multi-room listening.
What’s new in 5.2.0
This release focuses heavily on the new Studio / Control Room experience.
Studio is now built around a clearer flow:
choose what player or group you are controlling
control playback directly
access music, queue tools, actions, timers, announcements, and diagnostics from contextual panels
Studio / Control Room improvements
New focused Studio layout with a clear current control target
Rich live player tiles with volume, mute, play/pause, next, queue count, status badges, and selection state
Multi-player actions for controlling several players at once
Better grouping and ungrouping flow
Cleaner Actions panel so the interface stays powerful without feeling overloaded
Music Hub
Studio now includes easier access to:
Music Assistant search
full library browsing
recent listening
favorites
smart mix tools
scenes
visual media results with Play, Next, Add, Radio, and Like actions
Queue Cockpit
The queue tools were also improved:
inspect source and target queues
transfer queue between players
clone queue without removing it from the source
refresh and clear queues
clearer queue handling inside Studio
Announcement Studio
The announcement screen was redesigned with:
clearer target display
compact message input
announcement volume boost
cleaner send action
stronger panel visibility and more consistent styling
Performance Mode
A new weak-device performance mode was added for devices like Nest Hub or older tablets.
It disables heavier visual effects such as blur, dynamic color extraction, motion, and expensive background effects to make the card run smoother.
Bug fixes
This release also fixes:
Studio close-button overlap when opening Studio from compact/fullscreen mode
“This Device” Sendspin player not appearing as a Studio tile after connecting
Performance Mode not turning off correctly from in-card settings
queue inline action row flicker when opening or closing actions
Installation
The card is available as a HACS custom repository:
Use it with:
type: custom:homeii-music-flow
I’d love feedback from anyone using Music Assistant with wall tablets, mobile dashboards, multi-room audio, or Sendspin browser players.
While Version 5.2.0 is currently the stable release, I’m excited to share the roadmap for our next major milestone. The upcoming 5.3.0 release is all about the Studio Evolution—transforming the interface into a more complete, cleaner, and powerful Music Assistant control room.
What’s coming in the 5.3.0 Studio Experience:
Saved Studio Scenes: Save and reuse local Studio scenes with selected players, volume levels, and grouping intent.
The Queue Cockpit: A polished layout for managing music flow with dedicated actions for Transfer, Clone, Refresh, and Clear Queue.
Enhanced Group Awareness: Grouped players are now easier to identify with a dedicated group summary and clearer badges.
Faster Music Hub Access: Direct Studio shortcuts for playlists, artists, albums, tracks, and radio.
Improved Actions Hub: Redesigned center for player controls, announcements, timers, and ‘Pro’ tools.
Studio Pro Context: Real-time diagnostic data including protocol, Direct API status, and Sendspin/device status.
Safer ‘Stop All’: A robust flow to stop playback, clear queues, and disconnect groups across the entire system.
The Focus: This release is about making the STUDIO feel like a real control room: powerful and feature-rich, yet cleaner and safer for daily use. Please note that Studio features are optimized for wide-screen and tablet layouts.
Community Feedback: This project grows through its users! Additional ideas, feature requests, or feedback are more than welcome. If there’s something you’ve always wanted in your music control room, let me know.
Version 5.2.0 is live now. The Studio Evolution (5.3.0) is coming soon.
The setting button is missing so there is no way to change to English. You screenshots show a settings gear icon in the upper right corner but in version 5.2.0 it is missing.
The settings icon is definitely part of version 5.2.0. If you are not seeing it, it is likely a caching issue or a configuration source conflict. Please follow these steps to resolve it:
Hard Refresh: First, try a hard refresh of your browser by pressing CTRL + F5. This clears the local cache and ensures you are loading the latest version of the script.
Configuration Source: If the icon still doesn’t appear, you can change the language through the Home Assistant Visual Editor:
Open the Visual Editor for the card.
Go to the General tab.
Change the Setting Source to ‘Card Configuration’.
Set the language to English and Save.
Reset to In-Card: After saving, you can try switching the Setting Source back to ‘In-Card’ and saving again. The gear icon should now be visible
HOMEii Flow is now officially merged into the Music Assistant community extensions list + Seeking Your Feedback
Great news everyone—HOMEii Flow is now officially merged into the Music Assistant community extensions list! A huge thanks to the MA team.
Now that Version 5.2.0 is reaching more of you, I’d love to hear your thoughts to help shape the next version:
Your Experience: How does the ‘Liquid’ aesthetic and the general flow feel on your daily dashboard?
Show Off Your Setup: I’m especially curious to see how the card looks in the wild—please share a screenshot of your wall-mounted tablets or desktop setups!
Studio Mode: For those using wide-screen layouts, is the current Studio experience meeting your needs?
What’s Next? Your impressions will directly impact the development of Version 5.3.0 - Studio Evolution, which will introduce saved scenes, an improved Queue Cockpit (with Clone/Transfer), and better group awareness.
Ideas and suggestions are more than welcome! Let’s make the ultimate music control room together.
The other thing that I notice is the Cover- Art only updates on my phone but not on web browser interface until you do a Reload of the page. Test on Edge, Chrome and Brave browsers.
Just to clarify: language: en only changes the display language. It should not affect whether the settings button appears.
For the settings icon: HOMEii Flow currently shows the in-card Settings entry in the bottom/main action bar when settings are managed by the in-card UI. If the card is configured with settings_source: card, the in-card settings button is hidden by design because those options are managed from the Home Assistant visual card editor instead.
Could you please share your card YAML, with tokens/URLs redacted? The important lines are:
type
settings_source
mobile_main_bar_items
layout_mode
the installed HOMEii Flow version
Also, please confirm whether you are expecting a gear icon at the top of the card or a Settings button in the bottom action bar.
For the cover art issue: that sounds like a separate refresh bug. If the artwork updates on mobile but not in desktop browsers until a page reload, the card may be holding on to an old queue/artwork snapshot. I’ll check the artwork refresh logic so the desktop layout updates when entity_picture / current media artwork changes, without requiring a full page reload.
I do not see a line in the YAML about Flow version but since this is the first day of installing and testing what I downloaded was the latest release version 5.2.0
HOMEii Flow – a full music app experience for Music Assistant inside Home Assistant
