🎵 HOMEii Flow – a full music app experience for Music Assistant inside Home Assistant

[harryfine]

I have a few issues that may be my not understand how things work, or they may be bugs.

Selecting and deselecting has always been an issue for me. I'm using 5.9 but same for 5.8.

I select living room Arc and select radio station and play. I then go into the current program on th eliving room Arc, and use the Group button. I add kitchen and Terrace and Living Room Pair by pressing the plus signs beside those speakers and then at the bottom, APPLY GROUP.

Now I want to remove the terrace as I'm no longer outside. I click on terrace pair, and it reverts to the + sign. Yet the terrace speaker is still playing, so I figure I need to APPLY the change. So, I have 2 choices at this point. UNGROUP, which ungroups them all, and APPLY GROUP. That's the logical button, because it should change to remove the terrace speaker. It doesn't. It still plays.

It also still shows 4 speakers. Actyually 5. It seems to have added OFFICE on its own. So I click office to get the plus sign back, and it goes down to showing 2 playing, Living Room ARC and kitchen. But there are 3 lit up. It's making it unusable in daily use.

I'm concused about the highlighting to ORANGE, is that playing? Yet some are orange with the plus sign showing, indicating that they are not playing.

The queue also confuses me. It often shows with the number 6 beside it when there is nothing in the queue. I've attached 2 screenshots.

Frankly I think the grouping interface is a mess. I hope you will look at it, do some usability testing with strangers, and figure out how to make this work, and how to make it intuitive.

I just deselected all. Selected ONLY office, played the selection, a radio station, and take a look...it paired 2 others?

Finally, I often get a message starting with "Music Assistant Requires..." but it's too fast for me to cut and paste.

[RaA11]

Thanks for the detailed report. I agree with you: the grouping UI is not clear enough right now, and from your description this does not sound like only a misunderstanding.

I think there are two issues here:

1. The group screen is confusing visually. The orange highlight, plus sign, selected state, playing state, and current group membership are not clearly separated enough.
2. More importantly, “Apply Group” may currently behave more like “add these players to the group” than “replace the current group with exactly this selection”. So when you deselect Terrace and press Apply Group, HOMEii may not be explicitly removing Terrace from the existing group.

That would also explain why the visible selected/playing count can become inconsistent.

I’m going to review and redesign this flow so it behaves more predictably:

• Apply changes should make the real speaker group match the visible selection.
• Removed speakers should actually be unjoined.
• Current group members, pending changes, and currently playing speakers should be visually distinct.
• Group/player counts should refresh correctly after changes.
• The queue badge also needs a review, because it should not show a stale count when the selected queue is empty.

For the “Music Assistant Requires...” message, could you please also send a HOMEii Diagnostics report?

How to run it:

1. Open the HOMEii Flow card.
2. Go to Settings.
3. Open General.
4. Set Settings Source to In-card Settings.
5. Save/reload the dashboard if Home Assistant asks you to.
6. Select the player where the problem happens.
7. Go back to the HOMEii card settings.
8. Open Music Assistant.
9. Open Diagnostics.
10. Click Run diagnostics / Copy report.
11. Paste the full report here.

Please run diagnostics from inside the card, not only from the visual editor, because the in-card report includes the selected player, queue identity, queue snapshot, and group/player context.

Thank you for calling this out clearly. I agree this area needs usability work, not just small cosmetic tweaks.

[hassuser95]

hi @RaA11

just wondering if it is possible to have this player full screen and occupy the remaining space on the right part of my dashboard?

thank you

[RaA11]

@hassuser95

just wondering if it is possible to have this player full screen and occupy the remaining space on the right part of my dashboard?

Wow, your dashboard looks absolutely beautiful! To be honest, I haven't personally tested it in a layout like that yet, but it looks amazing.

You should definitely try setting that specific dashboard tab's View Type to Panel (1 card). In Home Assistant, the Panel mode forces a single card to stretch edge-to-edge and occupy 100% of the remaining width and height, which is exactly what you are looking for.

Give that a shot and let me know if it works for you!

[hassuser95]

will give it a try. any idea on how to remove the border-radius for it to have a full screen?

[RaA11]

That rounded corner is part of the built-in HOMEii Flow design.

I don’t currently plan to add a separate setting just for changing the card radius, but you may be able to override it with card-mod.

You can try:

type: custom:homeii-music-flow
card_mod:
  style: |
    :host {
      --ma-radius-xl: 0px !important;
      border-radius: 0 !important;
    }

    ha-card,
    .card {
      border-radius: 0 !important;
      overflow: hidden !important;
    }

If your dashboard/theme still keeps a radius after that, it is most likely coming from Home Assistant layout styling or from the card’s internal shadow DOM, and I would leave it as part of the HOMEii visual style for now.

[hassuser95]

thanks for this.

somehow it didnt work. will leave it as is for now and be back later on as the dashboard is still in progress.

[curious]

I think hassuser95 is referring to this message: set a direct music assistant url and token in the card settings before connecting this device

I get this message when I want to use the player "this device". When I run diagnostics it says the ma_url is not needed.

When using the "normal"music assistant integration "this device" plays normal.

How to solve this

[RaA11]

There are two different “This device” paths here.

The diagnostics saying ma_url is not needed is correct for the normal Home Assistant / Music Assistant integration path. In that mode, HOMEii talks to Home Assistant only, and normal playback/control can work without ma_url.

The message you see is for HOMEii’s built-in “Connect this device” / Sendspin browser player. That feature turns the browser running the card into a direct Music Assistant playback client, so it cannot work through the HA integration only. It needs a direct Music Assistant Web Server URL and a token.

So there are two options:

1. If the normal Music Assistant “This device” player already works for you, you can keep using that and ignore HOMEii’s “Connect this device” button.

2. If you want HOMEii to connect this browser as its own local Sendspin player, add the direct Music Assistant URL and token in the card settings. The URL should be the direct MA server, for example http://your-ha-ip:8095, not the Home Assistant ingress/add-on page.

If your HA dashboard is loaded over HTTPS, an HTTP Music Assistant URL may be blocked by the browser. In that case you need local HTTP access, VPN/local network access, or an HTTPS/reverse-proxied Music Assistant URL.

[curious]

thank you for your quick reply. Where should I set the ma-url ?

[RaA11]

[maurizio53 (Maurizio Fabiani)]

I am getting this error but don't know how to fix it:

[RaA11]

This warning means the value you entered in ma_url is not the direct Music Assistant API.

If you are only using normal HOMEii playback through the Home Assistant Music Assistant integration, the easiest fix is:

1. Open the HOMEii card settings / YAML.
2. Clear ma_url.
3. Clear ma_token.
4. Save and refresh the dashboard.

HOMEii does not need ma_url for normal playback, library, queue, and player control through Home Assistant.

Only set ma_url if you want Direct Music Assistant features, especially “This device” / Sendspin browser playback. In that case it must be the direct Music Assistant Web Server URL, for example:

ma_url: "http://homeassistant.local:8095"
ma_token: "YOUR_MUSIC_ASSISTANT_TOKEN

Do not use:

http://homeassistant.local:8123
/music-assistant
/d5369777_music_assistant
.../ws

Those are Home Assistant / ingress / websocket paths, not the direct Music Assistant API.

If your Home Assistant dashboard is opened over HTTPS, the Music Assistant URL also needs to be HTTPS, or the browser may block it.

[maurizio53 (Maurizio Fabiani)]

Actually i have this in the options:

config_entry_id: ""
ma_url: 192.168.1.24:8095
music_assistant_external_url: ""
ma_token: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Is this correct or not?

And if i wanto to use sendspin what and where to change ?