Managing Media Player Group w/ Automations

Configuration
1

I’ve created a media player group, using a helper from within GUI, to maintain a group/list of speakers that I want verbal announcements/reminders to broadcast from.

I’m wanting to manage this group’s associated speakers using various toggles, where, if the toggle is “on” for a given speaker, it should be added to the group. Alternatively, if the toggle is “off” then that speaker should be removed from the group.

To make those changes in my automations, I thought I had found the action I was looking for with “Group: Set.” However I could never get it to work. After searching, I did find a reason as to why it’s not working, but not an answer about how to proceed going forward.

Is it correct that, in order to use the “Group: Set” action, I have to declare the Group in the “old style” in YAML? Or is there a way for me to still use the helper-generated GUI group? I’d much prefer the latter as the docs themselves say that the old-style should be avoided.

2

  • A group entity is defined exclusively via YAML and there are actions to add/remove members of a group entity.

  • The “Group Helper” you create via the UI doesn’t produce a group entity. It produces switch, light, media_player, etc entities which have no actions to manage their membership.

So if you want to programmatically manage membership, you will need to use a group entity.