Is anyone aware of any applications or setups that would allow multi room audio where I can be playing music or some content (most likely from a cloud streaming service ie. spotify) and then have home assistant play a TTS notification and have it either mute the music or lower the volume of it while it plays the notification.
I was hoping to do something with a few pi’s and the hifiberry dacs but haven’t been able to find out how to do the audio mixing side of things.
I’m also very interested in this. I found something about Forked-daapd for multiroom audio. In combination with Shairport I’m thinking it would work. I don’t know about the TTS though… lets see what others will come up with.
I did see one post vaguely mentioning something about alsa dmix but it didnt have enough detail for me to piece together how it worked.
Google homes will do this. I have 4 setup. You can play music to all. Also get notification via H A. Works great. Cheap solution with Google home minis and you can add more as needed.
I think Sonos had a pause and resume service type thing, and as mentioned above Google home devices can do this, but chromecast audios don’t support it.
last time i tried it wouldnt mix in the notifications and it would just stop whatever it was playing and then play the notification and not resume the previous music
This works for me with Echo (Alexa) as a Media Player custom component, amazon music unlimited and echo input into my whole house audio system. It lowers the music volume, plays the notification, then raises volume.
Ah OK not sure about resuming audio. Will have to test that.
There are basically two ways to send messages to Google Homes from HA.
Broadcast - goes to all google homes, can’t select specific ones, not compatible with chromecasts, will resume previous audio, uses google assistant TTS.
Send TTS messages from HA - can choose where to send it, uses whatever HA TTS setup you have, creates an MP3 and sends it to the device, doesn’t resume audio.
I’m currently using node-red to do something similar to the second option using a wavenet node (for better voices) and a cast node to send to the device. Not bothered about restarting music though and I think that would be difficult to manage.
I don’t know any that does that. The consensus with Google Home seems to be saving the current state of the media_player, send the tts notification, then restore what was playing by restoring from backed up state
Has anyone found a solution how to mix Spotify and TTS?
I bought Hifiberry DAC+ to get better sound quality for Spotify, and actually initially HAD Spotify and TTS mix together when playing to Pi’s 3.5mm audio out. In the process of migrating to HifiBerry, I lost my setup code and haven’t been able to get it working again.
Simple pausing Spotify, playing TTS, resuming Spotify is doable, but I’d prefer the mixing solution.
Did you ever take a look at snapcast in combination with mopidy? I set it up for testing and it supports multi room audio (synced or different music in each room) from different sources (Spotify, local media etc.) and TTS as well.