- Not at this time
- No sorry
- There are third party applications to do this. Note that there is a bug at the moment causing local album art to randomly disappear.
- I think you want the Album Artist Filter. Look at the icons in the menu at the top
- Having a native Kodi player is on the roadmap. As a source the general approach is to cutout middle men unless there is something that MA can’t do. But maybe in the future MA might see Kodi as a DLNA provider for example.
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FYI, I am pretty sure that Plex uses the exact same standard for externl artwork support as Kodi (formerly XBMC) as Plex was originally a fork of it and is still at least partially a derivative.
I believe Jellyfin and Emby media servers uses the same standard for external artwork files as Kodi (and Plex) too?
https://kodi.wiki/view/Artwork_types
https://kodi.wiki/view/Artwork/Album
https://kodi.wiki/view/Artwork/Artist
And local (external) artwork goes first so it overwrites embedded and automatically downloaded artwork:
https://kodi.wiki/view/Artwork/Changing
https://kodi.wiki/view/Artwork/Creating
Same gods with external NFO files for metadata that overwrite embedded tags:
https://kodi.wiki/view/Artist_information_folder
As they say, the use of such custom artwork will transform your mundane media player into a showpiece to be proud of, and Kodi has an addon to dump its artwork to external files that make them easy to work with for third-party applications:
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I don’t have a github account. Was only really curious as to how to make this work a little better. It was more a “is this possible”, not really a request.
Thanks.
1 - “Not at this time” sounds hopeful. Am without album images until cover.jpg can be read. (Weird it seems to work on a few folder.jpgs)
3 - Can anyone give me a hint? I didn’t see anything in this thread when I read it. I am noticing that as I open up aritsts there is an 80% chance it will get artwork and a description… something to slowly automate that would be nice.
4 - Will check that. Thanks (Found it, perfect. Just what I was looking for)
5 - Nice to see it is on the roadmap.
My current way of accessing KODI via HA is “unusual” I guess. If I am out of the house, I will connect my phone to home via a VPN. I then start the HA app on the phone, boot up the KODI PC via Wake on LAN, then use a web page embedded in the HA page to play music “locally” through the browser.
Once on the VPN I could also just access the web page direct, but am just used to streaming via the web page in the HA control panel.
Would not touch DLNA as too limited.
For now I’ll run the HA MA 2.0 in parallel and just experiment with things. I still hold out hope that one day Bluetooth speakers are allowed. Until then I use KODI to connect to those speakers in other rooms via BT. Just control everything KODI via HA.
Someone on Discord suggested this but I haven’t tried it yet Releases · Komet/MediaElch · GitHub
Artist info and art, if not local, is only pulled down when you first visit the item. This is because MA’s popularity became such that the project was getting cease and desist notices from the providers. So everything has been scaled back to keep it working. Back to your local artwork though cover.jpg should work File System Provider - Music Assistant so file an issue if it isn’t. Do a test and rename one to folder.jpg though to make sure it isn’t a file problem.
BT speakers can be connected to MA if you use picoreplayer as the target device as that allows BT connections.
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MediaElch - am aware of that project. Will have to look at some kinda combo that can be friendly to KODI and HA MA.
cover.jpg: I know for certain that all the albums I pointed MA at have a cover.jpg. (Also back, medium, booklets, etc) I only exposed MA to my better quality source.
In this test, roughly 200 artist folders, with maybe 1200 albums in there, some of these with multiple CD subfolders, all with extensive local artwork.
I thought the album art was failing due to “If you have local artwork then it is important that album FOLDER names exactly match the tagged album name” but this does not explain why a few work fine.
Oddly when there is an Artist image loaded, that then sometimes gets swapped into place of the missing album image.
This is acting a little different today. Maybe it is just taking a long time to settle. Just opened one random artist and now 6 out of 8 albums are showing fine… no logic I can see yet. Open another artist, single album artwork loads. Open another and artist image then slots into place instead of album. Most still won’t read cover.jpg
Not had time to investigate the pattern of why some albums got artwork. Will poke more when I get time.
“picoreplayer” - I had started to look at what options that could give me. I have some spare PI’s. Initially misunderstood and thought I’d need to attach a PI to each set of speakers. Now realise I just need picoplayer running somewhere HA MA can talk to it… All part of the fun of experimenting.
Any plans for a dedicated Music Assistant Companion app for iOS and Android for on-device playback?
i.e. a dedicated playback mobile app for MA with built-in local player similar to Plexamp and such apps.
Plus different accounts, so each family members including kids can have their own library and history?
In theory yes to the apps but no resources at the moment.
Regarding separate libraries this is for Marcel on Discord
The whole idea about MA is merging all these providers together, not separating them. So a library per user is something i will never ever implement as that would change the very core. What I may consider is introducing some frontend filters but then I’d like to rely on HA login and not introduce our own login.
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I can see artwork is being a little too weird for me from the SMB source. Is there any way to say don’t download cover art from external sources, but do get the descriptions?
Even though all of my albums have cover.jpg art, it is ignoring it and going for the online versions instead. These are often lower quality due to theAudioDB being used.
-=-
If I removed the SMB source so I could replace it with a smaller test set, is the file space used by the downloaded artwork automatically released? Or do I need to find a folder in the OS to delete?
No there is no option to only use local artwork as local artwork is preferred. If you are finding Artist thumbs are appearing instead of the album art then I would be looking at your folder structure and naming.
If you remove the file system provider then everything should be cleaned up. This takes a little while depending on the number of items.
P.S. You should experiment by grabbing a working image from one folder and dropping it another and seeing if it gets picked up.
I installed add on and everything works except streaming 
I have configured chromecast players (chromecast itself and onkyo amplituner) and playing either silently fails or doesn’t start at all. How to troubleshoot it?
I can stream to those devices from mobiles and laptop…
Hey i hope someone can help me with a question 
I am using Music Assistant with the integrated Snapserver and multiple Snapclients.
I created a Snapcast Group (not a Universal Group) in the Music Assistant GUI and it is working mainly without problems to sync music across the players.
I also can use the media_player.turn_on/turn_off feature to play only on the players i want playback on.
I don’t know if it is a Snapcast specific thing or with all player providers but it seems the groups have a Group Leader. You can see it in the state of the players:
media_player.group_player:
attributes:
group_members: ma_b827eb89ad15, ma_b827eb3a185f, ma_b827eb5abfbb
media_player.first_player:
attributes:
group_members: ma_b827eb89ad15, ma_b827eb3a185f
mass_player_id: ma_b827eb89ad15
group_leader: null
media_player.second_player:
attributes:
group_members: ma_b827eb89ad15, ma_b827eb3a185f
mass_player_type: player
group_leader: ma_b827eb89ad15
media_player.third_player:
attributes:
group_members:
mass_player_id: ma_b827eb5abfbb
group_leader: null
So here first_player and second_player are playing and third_player is off.
The first_player is also the group_leader.
So now to the problem:
I can turn_off second_player no problem and i could also join the third_player if i wanted with media_player.join.
But i can’t seem to turn of first_player (the group_leader) without stopping playback on all other players.
Is there like a way to transfer ownership of the queue/group (without resetting to the start of the queue) before turning that player off? Or is it maybe just snapcast specific and there is like a workaround you can use?
I have looked around but it seems the problem has not come up yet for someone else yet
For me it was my network configuration that gave me problems with Google Cast devices
The Cast devices need to be able to reach the Music Assistant Server (with the Addon it is the IP of Home Assistant itself) and specifically Port 8096 and upwards.
You can also set the log level of a specific provider with Settings - Chromecast in your case under Player Provider - Advanced Settings - Log Level to get more Log Infos
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Thanks! Increasing log verbosity was bullseye! I had wrong IP’s binding left - came from the time when I had multiple interfaces…
Using the join service call and grouping through the UI will result in different behaviour User Interface - Music Assistant Not sure sure if you are having problems because you are mixing the methods?
Thank you sorry i missed that part in the documentation
Although it seems to behave the same in the UI for me.
When i turn off the player flagged as Leader (from HA Integration Status as i think the MA UI has no indication) it stops playback on all devices and sets the Speaker Group Status to idle both in the MA UI and in HA.
Is that the expected behaviour?
The Snapcast dev is taking a look
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I am so much celebrating this right now. I have my local music collection in a self-hosted Nextcloud instance and wondered how I can make it available to Sonos etc (which only supports NAS, which might have become complicated).
However, I discovered that the Nextcloud Music app I have been using for some time provides two APIs, one of which (Subsonic) is supported by Music Assistant. Using the Subsonic music provider, it was so easy to hook them up, and now I can play music directly from my Nextcloud to the speakers. I love it.
Thanks for supporting open source APIs!
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Music Assistant is fantastic. I want to create a direct link to Music Assistant running as an Add-on in HA Core, so it opens in its own browser window without the rest of Home Assistant visible - just for playing music. I cannot figure out how to do this.
I’ve tried to set up a link using https://my.home-assistant.io but I can’t figure out how to refer to the addon - music-assistant, the add-on slug music_assistant or the host name displayed on the add-on page don’t work. Anyway, I’m not sure this would be the best way to reach the add-on since there is an intermediary page with my.home-assistant.io.
How can I work out the right URL to get straight into Music Assistant?
Figured it out:
Go into Music Assistant in HA. Settings > Core > Web Server then enable. It is then reachable on port 8095 at my HA local address - e.g. http://home-assistant:8095.
Happy days!
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This is why I need to abandon the project for now. I cannot rename my album folders to match the album tags as how would I have multiple copies of Dark Side of the Moon together under Pink Floyd? i.e. my original CD, 20th anniversary, 30th anniversary, 50th anniversary editions currently sit side by side. Or Peter Gabriel’s first four albums are all called Peter Gabriel.
It would be better if the media player can just pick up the cover.jpg from the same location as it finds the music files, no matter the name of the folder. Kinda like most other media players do. From old Winamp to my mobile phones it is a system that has been pretty consistent.
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I agree, if LMS can pick up my 286G of music in a matter of minutes from the tags and standard named files like cover.jpg, then why can’t MA?
Why is it going to the internet to scrape at all?
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