You didn’t answer my question, but I would use squeezelite/slimproto.
Except to my knowledge there is no solution which combines a voice assistant and media player. You can use another RPi (any version) and run picoreplayer on it which by default uses squeezelite as recommended by Nick
The latest beta has changes which hopefully address your concern. It would be great if you could test and advise if your album imagery appears.
I will work out how to install the Beta and report back. Installed and running…
Thanks for listening to the feedback. 
-=-=-
Okay… it will take a while to read in all my albums, but initial results look promising. Album artwork straight away. I recognise my local artwork.
Also if I swap to track view I now see the images of the album covers and not artists.
For other people reading this. What is special is this is reading the cover.jpg in the local folders even though I have weird folder names. My folders are \artist\[year] album\ or \artist\[year] album (extra notes)\ and rarely match the tags.
Nice one. Thanks a lot for this tweak. 
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Where do you download betas?
I found the Beta by following this:
Click the linky on that page. It then gave me a normal repo, the beta repo and a dev repo.
@harryfine It was still in my browser history as I had to go on a bit of a magical mystery tour to find it. Not used to using Betas \ Github \ etc. Always good to share the knowledge onwards.
For the testing feedback - albums seem all populated now. And lots of luscious artwork. I don’t have too many artist.jpgs, they seem to all be there. The rest are being looked up when I open up an artist. Which is good to see. Will now mess around with the playback side a bit more.
I still hope that you reconsider and add full support for local playback without need of any scrapping in the background and fetching unnecessary info from the internet. Just use available metadata from the files and attached cover arts (cover.jpg). I am pretty sure I have several rare artist/songs that cloud providers have no idea about, and I can easily play them in my desktop/android music player with all local metadata and cover arts.
I think this would also make database creation predictable and fast with ETA info and a progress bar. Additional info like artist pictures or missing album art could be enabled in the settings if user wants it.
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I think you misunderstood. That is already how it works. There was just a bug reported above which is now fixed. We only scrape additional metadata if its NOT present locally. E.g. for folks that just do not care about tagging their music and dump it all in one mess in a folder.
The Music Assistant add-on repository is present by default in Home Assistant. You just go to the add-on store (within the add-ons section) and search for Music Assistant. You then see the default/stable version just named “Music Assistant”, the beta version named “Music Assistant BETA” and even a DEV/NIGHTLY version.
If you are not running the full version of Music Assistant but manage your (docker) containers manually you just need to use the correct tag.
This is a problem too. I have a number of such files without any metadata and album art. They have filenames like artist - song_name. And online metadata providers have no idea about those songs too. So scraping additional metadata doesn’t make scene for such files. I would like to disable such automatic scraping mechanism globally in the settings and just display such songs as filenames as fallback.
That is already how it works. I think you confuse MA with Plex ?
no, never used Plex and similar. I just have mpd installed, where nothing is scraped from internet and I like this approach.
Stick the beta on and try it. First step turn off the three metadata providers. Then add your music source. The beta behaves much better and grabs things from local. I recognise my own artwork now.
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There seems to be some kind of confusions when I have multiple copies of an album. They get merged into one item.
Example, Faithless and their “Outrospective” album. I have four copies. All sitting in the Faithless folder. All tagged with slightly different titles.
Faithless\Outrospective - 1CD, 12 tracks
Faithless\Outrospective (Fred’s copy) - 1CD, 12 tracks
Faithless\Outrospective Reperspective The Remixes - 2CD, 12+13 tracks
Faithless\Outrospective (sunshine) - 1CD, 13 tracks
In my case, all four of these have these titles in both the folder names and in the FLAC tags.
What I would expect to see is four separate albums listed.
Instead what I get from MA is a single album called “Outrospective (sunshine)” and it has the combination of tracks of all four of the above. It has CD1 13 tracks, CD2 13 tracks. Nothing duplicated.
KODI’s solution to this is to separate albums based on MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMID (what MusicBrainz call their Release ID. Unique to a specific version of an album). That then gives me four albums.
Or at least please separate albums on the FLAC album TAG text. I would assume it is quite common for people to own original and deluxe editions.
Another example. In the UK CD singles were often released as multiple items. So three separate singles with a common name.
Skunk Anansie \ Brazen (Weep) (CD1) - 4 tracks
Skunk Anansie \ Brazen (Weep) (CD2) - 4 tracks
Skunk Anansie \ Brazen (Weep) (CD3) - 3 tracks
Again this appears as a merged item “Brazen (Weep) (CD1)” with 11 tracks. As these are various remixes all with unique names now I have three track 1, three track 2, three track 3, two track 4.
Note this time I have a variation between the folder names and the album TAG. But still unique for CD1, CD2, CD3. MA has set the album title here as “Brazen ‘Weep’ (CD1) (single)” for all three CDs even though this is only the name for CD1.
Not sure why these are being combined. To a computer reading the text I can’t see why it is choosing to combine what is different text.
On a side note I am a heavy user of MusicBrainz and Discogs. Active on both sites. So my music is heavily tagged with MBIDs. It almost feels like the above are being grouped by MUSICBRAINZ_RELEASEGROUPID instead of MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMID 
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Look carefully at the tags to see what MB has. They have a policy of not seeing some releases as different and thus apply the same tags. Its possible there is a bug so, after reviewing, if your think MA is doing something wrong then open an issue on GitHub.
As I added many of these releases to MB I know they are separate over there. All with their own track lists and artwork. 
I initially wondered if these were combined due to the “official” album name as on the MB database. The singles are all called “Brazen ‘Weep’” in their database, hence my changing the tags and folder names on my own versions.
But that would not explain why “Outrospective Reperspective The Remixes” got merged in with “Outrospective (sunshine).” It is in the same Release Group, but has a unique title due to the inclusion of that second CD.
Also the fact MA uses my titles on the album names shows MA is reading my tags.
It feels like the above are being grouped by MUSICBRAINZ_RELEASEGROUPID instead of MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMID Just a theory?
The test albums I have exposed MA to are all from CDs I rip and feed through MusicBrainz Picard. Often adding to their database in the process. This is a clean and compliant set for MA to work on.
Sorry, don’t have a Github account.
Clearly this shouldn’t be happening but we won’t be able to help further here. If you are on discord we can start a thread there to investigate.
Sorry, no Discord either. If someone wants a loan of example test files then Personal Message me via this forum and I’ll zip some of the above examples up. Obviously copyright so would be for test use only…