Yes put in a feature request so it can be further discussed. This was changed to current behaviour when people complained they were caught out playing to a player they didn’t select!
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Anyway way to get AUX audio input for from external analog audio source like a vinyl record player / LP turntable?
Would be great if could buy some kind of music streamer hardware with analog AUX input to use as source provider.
Have previously used the ”Vinyl Cast” app on an Android phone/tablet for casting to Chromecast Audio but it is very buggy.
The initial release of the Vinyl Cast app included using Audio ACR to detect the song being played, but unfortunately this feature relied on a now discontinued third-party library/service so the feature was removed.
@marcelveldt are you also working ln the new/upcoming Matter Casting open protocol standard (so far only supported by Amazon)?
“Matter Casting” is a new open protocol standard that is only a small part of the currently much-hyped Matter standard suite for IoT which is being lead and developed by the CSA (Connectivity Standards Alliance) and its very impressive list of member companies:
Maybe a good idea to consider getting early into the development of this new open protocol that might become eventually a larger industry standard in the future as it is not proprietary like the competing Google Cast / Google Chromecast and Apple AirPlay.
“Matter Casting” is a technology that allows you to cast video and/or audio content from your smartphone, tablet, and computer to your TV or smart display. From an end-users point-of-view it will work the same thing as Google Cast and Apple AirPlay with one major difference: Matter Casting is a royaltee free and open protocol standward and will be based on common open-source code. That means it is a “free” casting standard designed from the ground up for cross-platform compatibility (with both Android, iOS devices, and various computer operating-systems being compatible from the start), allowing any developer to implement it into its products. Hopefullyy eventually ensureing wider-spread compatibility between devices of different manufacturers.
So the reason why I think Matter Casting is interesting is that it is the first attempt by a large technology consortium to create an new unified open standard for local video and audio casting that is meant for broader adoption across different ecosystems for interoperability.
As you obviously know, Matter in general already has hundreds of member companies, but I understand that not everyone has publicly commited to every part of that standard, as most have only announced support for the IoT parts that is controlling smart devices, however support for additonal device types, like this Matter Casting feature, is now being announced regularly
Anyway, Matter Casting has so far ‘only’ been adopted by Amazon who announced that they will first add support to newer Amazon Fire TV and Amazon Echo Show series of smart display devices, and even it sounds as if they might initially only implement video streaming?
This is just hot from the press of the CES 2024 (Consumer Electronics Show, which is the lagest tech event in the world).
More interestingly, Amazon has now stated that they will not add support for Google Cast or Apple AirPlay casting to their devices:
"Amazon is a long-time supporter of using open technology standards to give customers more choice over the devices and services they use in their homes. That’s also why Amazon is a founding member and key contributor to the Matter Standard. At CES, Amazon announced Matter Casting, which enables customers to cast content to Fire TV and Echo Show 15 devices directly from supported streaming apps on iOS and Android. Customers can begin watching a movie or browse for their next favorite show from Prime Video on their phone, and cast it to their compatible Fire TV device or Echo Show 15. This is an industry-first demonstration of implementing Matter Casting.
We are excited to work with Amazon to bring Matter Casting to the STARZ app. Matter has been easy to integrate and will provide even more options for customers to enjoy our extensive collection of original series and popular films on their device of choice,” said Alison Hoffman, STARZ President of Domestic Networks.
Matter Casting is available now for customers around the world who want to cast Prime Video content from iOS and Android devices to Echo Show 15. It will be coming to compatible Fire TV devices in the coming months, including smart TVs from Panasonic with Fire TV built in. We’re working with Plex, Pluto TV, Sling TV, STARZ, and ZDF to add Matter Casting support later this year."
Disclaimer: Simply posted this for discussion since hoping for industry-wide adoption of an open standard for video and audio streaming in the future. I do not own any Amazon devices myself and do not plan on buying any (as personally already deeply invested in Google Cast hardware like Chromecast Audio, Google Home speakers and Google Nest speakers or other Google Cast compatible products, but if I ever migrate to a different ecosystem then decided it must be based on open standards).
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Recent is not a version. Be specific.
@nickrout FYI, I asked basically the same question two posts above your post.
Anyway, you can never have fully analogue for streaming as fully analog music streaming is not technically possible for music streaming over a LAN. Though if you only want to listen in order to get the audio for metadata then you could use a splitter.
For music streaming you will always need pipeline with an analog-to-digital converter (ADC , A/D , or A-to-D ) that converts an analog signal, such as a sound picked up by a microphone into a digital signal, and then you need a digital-to-analog converter (DAC , D/A , D2A , or D-to-A ) for each amplifer/speaker to convert the digital signal back into into an analog signal, (i.e. ADC and DAC do the reverse to each other.
However I think that having a high-quality ADC and high-quality DACs is good enough for music streams to multiroom speaker setup and such, though I am not an audiophile myself.
Normally you have to use an expensive propriatory Hi-Fi music streamer system to achive this, howverr there are also mid-range products like the ”WiiM Pro Plus” from Linkplay that have both analog and digital audio input ports, but practially all of them will only stream within their own ecosystem so you need to buy both music streamers and stream receivers from the same brand for all your speakers to make them compatible.
Fyi I was referring you to the question I asked 8 days ago.
I’m having issues with my jellyfin server.
I’ve connected, but no tracks show up.
Anybody here I can talk to to find what I’m doing wrong?
Nothing a shell pipeline can’t fix (or destroy in an instant!) 
This is not an accident. It’s deliberate. I actually read the exact code that does this not three days ago.
I think it’s fine. Perhaps there ought to be a known or customizable black list of artist and band names for which this isn’t done. But 60% of the time, it works every time.
Finally got the add-on to start, and I was able to use it after rebooting my VM host.
I spent a couple hours with it. I used Firefox on my desktop only, not the mobile app.
I have to say that the UI is not immediately intuitive. Some more documentation couldn’t hurt. The functionality seems to be very good, once you can get past some of these pain points.
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It seems I can’t select the player before I select content to play. That is very confusing
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I got gapless to work with DLNA using flow mode (not enquue). It was not easy to find the player settings to change this.
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For player settings, I kept pressing the “back” button without saving. Not sure if this can be trapped in the browser to have some confirmation to discard or save the changes.
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Gapless and volume normalization really don’t mix. I was playing a harpsichord gapless album. There is no ability to control volume on that instrument. The volume became notably lower on the second track of the album - in the middle of a note. It was totally unnatural and shocking. IMO, the normalization needs to be either disabled by default, or it should be done at the entire album level, not at the track level. The album in question is Byron Schenkman’s harpsichord variation (Händel). I was playing it from Qobuz. Play the album, then seek near the end of the first track. You do need to have gapless working to hear it.
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My local music connection is stored in both Plex and JRiver Media Center. I like the later a lot better, but did not see a music provider for it. Is this planned ? It should work over generic DLNA.
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I haven’t found a way to go back to an album once a track is playing, other than the search facility.
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“Recently played” only shows tracks, but not albums. I never want to see tracks there, only albums.
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There are problems with DLNA. Not sure if they are with MA or the device, or both. One is with the seek control display, which flies all over the place. I believe this one is a device bug, as I have seen it with other DLNA apps. The other is volume control of the DLNA player. MA forgets the last volume setting and always resets it when starting a new album. I haven’t seen that issue before even in other apps.
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I have 12 WiiM Pro Plus devices. Those support both DLNA and the Chromecast Audio protocol, as well as Airplay. I have Google Cast groups in addition. Each device shows up 3 times in the player list. There is no way to differentiate them - they have the same name. The list of player devices is really quite long. I understand they can be disabled one at a time, but it is tedious managing 40 player entries.
I would suggest this improvement : when configuring the player provider, all the corresponding devices should be shown in a list. There could be an enable/disable setting for each one.
- there should be some global settings for things like normalization and flow mode. Let the user override the global setting per-player if they want to. Doing these changes for each player is madness when there are a lot of devices.
This is about half the device list.
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I was unable to create a speaker group of Chromecast within MA . I know this can also be done within the Google Home app.
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in the UI settings, “tracks” appears twice
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Great job getting gapless mode to work on Chromecast audio, with flow mode enabled !
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When playing an album, “Currently playing” should show the album with the track list, and not just the one track, as it currently does.
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One of my Qobuz playlists has 1932 tracks in it. It’s basically impossible to scroll through it because MA seems to load items one at a time, only while scrolling. And the only way I can scroll is with the scroll wheel, apparently. The player UI is in the way of the scroll bar
The native Windows Qobuz app has no problem with this playlist - it loads it all at once, and the scrollbar actually works as it should, as do the home/end keys.
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Is there any way to make a playlist of albums, as opposed to a playlist of tracks ? This would be very useful. I don’t think most music providers support this, though. But a local playlist in MA could.
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The album view says I have 2656 albums at the top. But only a tiny fraction of them is shown, maybe 40. Looks like this is the same problem as number 15 : the album list isn’t loaded all at once. This might make sense if the issue is to limit network access/conserve RAM for the album covers. However, the issue is the same in “list” view.
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There seems to be no DSD support. Correct me if I’m wrong. I know this is niche, but I do have 0.5TB of DSD albums. Converting them to PCM takes extra space. The VM I’m using HAOS on has plenty of CPU to do real-time DSD to PCM transcoding. In fact, if Jriver worked as a music provider in MA, I could use it to do just that.
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Keyboard keys such as arrows don’t work at all in the add-on, as far as I can tell. They work pretty much everywhere in HA, and other add-ons such as Z-Wave JS UI.
UI - Music Assistant Feel free to provide some contructive feedback.
- Normalisation requires the track to be played once so it can be measured. After that there should be no issues. If there are then raise them on GH. A lot more info about this is in the docs.
- The default position is to use the filesystem provider so MA indexes the files directly and cuts out these middle men
- Correct DLNA is a hot mess of an old protocol patched together over 20 years. Indivudal player quirks can be expected but these can possibly be addressed as workload allows.
- You don’t need to load all the providers.
- Correct. Review the docs.
For the rest your preferences are noted, You can open feature requests on GitHub and see how much traction you get from other users.
12. Thanks will be fixed soon
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Serious Question, why do we need MatterCast when DLNA works fine, and is already built into 99% of the devices and has been for years ?
Thanks.
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Thanks. I’m still the problem. I played the first two tracks of the album I mentioned in full. The problem showed up - volume dropped going into the next track. I played the track completely. Then, I started again from the first track. The volume went down again when the second track started playing. I did it a third time, and this time there was no volume drop at the track transition. I was using Airplay with WiiM in this test. I am not sure if this is working as designed or if it’s a bug, but either way, I need the volume normalization off for all my player devices. I don’t think having to play all the tracks once or twice to trigger the analysis is usable. I understand analyzing all the favorite/playlist cloud music would use tons of bandwidth. IMO, the volume normalization just shouldn’t be on by default. Still would like a way to turn that off globally rather than per-device.
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I run HAOS in a VM. The host is Windows, and there is no Windows native version of HA. The media files are stored on the Windows NTFS. I suppose I could share the folders via SMB.
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With my mix of devices, I need at least two providers. I have two Chromecast Audio that only support Google Cast. Two Marantz receivers that support Airplay & DLNA. 12 WiiM Pro Plus that support Google Cast, Airplay and DLNA.
I need Google cast + either Airplay or DLNA. Looks like Airplay is more stable than DLNA. And Airplay lets me synchronize the Marantz receivers with the WiiMs. haven’t tried doing that yet, though.
The duplicate devices have slightly different names. The DLNA and Google cast devices show up with the the first letter capitalized. The Airplay devices have the first letter in lowercase. That’s probably not intended. However, in the screenshot below, the devices have different icons, in addition to having the device type listed.
As I showed earlier in the screenshot from the previous post, the “Players” list shows all the devices. The icons are the same for all in that case. Only the first letter differentiates Google Cast from Airplay.
I understand wanting to hide the technical details from the user and not showing different icons in that list. However, duplicate names are problematic, IMO. Perhaps, in this case, MA could modify the player string with a suffix, eg. “- Cast”, “- Airplay” or "- DLNA’.
We as end-users don’t need MatterCast (Matter Casting streaming today, but the question to @marcelveldt was working on the development of it since it is it probably a good idea to get in early if want to be able to influence the where that protocol and standard is heading in the future, like making sure it will be compatible with free and open source software.
I understand that type of things are at least what Nabu Casa to do with the Matter IoT protocol and what @marcelveldt is already on full time.
As such it could also be a good idea to look at MatterCast Matter Casting streaming support in any smart speakers and/or smart display hardware that Nabu Casa is working on for Home Assistent.
You should open an issue about volume normalisation if you believe it is not working correctly so it can be fixed.
Edit: you can change the player list icons in their player settings
@nickrout
The conversation did continue in the Github ticket. That is where the info is.
Core 2024.5.4
Supervisor 2024.05.1
Operating System 12.3
Frontend 20240501.1
Doesnt Music Assistant read the replaygain tags?
DLNA doesnt work fine. Implementors do whatever the f they want. My SoundTouch even returns invalid XML when called upon playing via DLNA. They couldnt even be bothered to get that simple thing right.