When creating an automation, use the Play Media action to pick a station from the directory.
I guess this hint gives a clue to experienced HA developers - but is far too subtle for new non-developers.
More detailed instructions are …
Going to Settings > Automations & Scenes > create automation > Create new automation.
In the New Automation page, under the “then Do” section, click [+ Add Action] .
On the Add action pop-up, select “media Player”, then the first “Play media” option - NOTE that there are 2 options both labelled “Play media” - you want the one with subtitle “Play media on media player”; and NOT the one with subtitle “Starts playing specified media”. You should now see:
Select your media player, then pick the media (audio) file you wish to play (it uses the HA Media Sources pop-up, so you can select local files (in the /media/ folder in HAOS, or a NAS share configured on Settings > System > Storage as a Media usage), Radio Browser (if installed), an installed Text-to-speech provider, … or I guess most anything installed in HA. It should now look similar to
Having selected the music to play, use the vertical 3-dots button to select the “Edit in YAML” option, and hey presto, there in the “data:” section is the media_content_id: that you can copy and paste into lovelace buttons, other automations, etc. There are also the title: and thumbnail: parameters provided by Radio Browaser.
Playing the same Radio station from my initial post (ABC Classic FM MP3) and then looking at HA > Developer Tools > States for my Kitchen Speaker shows a different media_content_id value (though they both work).
A bit more explanation for new users…
The radio-browser.info website maps their station ID to the current actual stream, which we see in the Developer Tools. Using the actual stream will start the music playing a little quicker - but if the station changes their streaming provider, we have to go back to radio-browser.info and look it up again to find the new stream URL.
Similarly, Developer Tools also shows local filenames translated into URLs
HAOS exposes the /media/ folder on the HA machine (mine is 192.168.1.98)
Hello! I have searched and searched to find the one which says “Play media on media player” but I can’t find it in the list when you type in ‘media player’. I can only find the “Starts playing specified media” which then doesn’t work.
Sigh. I found media_player rather confusing - all the pieces of required information are there in the documentation, but just not linked in a way that is very obvious. So I wrote the original post to make it easier … but I obviously did not do a good job
Actually the screen image you showed doesrequire you to enter a “Content ID” which is the pointer to the media file you want to play.
However I guess that you want to select a media file from some list … which I did say in my original post
In other words … you are in the wrong part of the user interface for what I think you are wanting to do.
Going back to the start of the original post
This is the page which allows you to pick media … and from where you can copy the media_content_id into the Content ID field in the Developer Tools pages.
As i said, it is rather confusing and took me quite a while to figure it out.
The problem was that when you click “+ Add action” and then you search for “play media”, only the wrong one shows up. You really have to navigate there through the “Media player” item, without using the search.
