Music Assistant 2.0: Your Music, Your Players

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769

It sounds like you don’t understand how MA works. MA sits in the middle of music providers and player providers. It allows you to create one large database of music from all the music providers and play to any of the player providers simultaneously. This picture was designed to visually show this

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You can only access the full MA database through the MA UI. You can access a subset of the database through the HA UI.

There is no working solution to combine a voice satellite and a media player that works with MA to my knowledge.

I maintain the MA documentation so I think your questions are answered there but feel free to make constructive suggestions for improvement

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770

There might not yet be a solution for that now, however I also hope there is a roadmap and/or some developer(s) that is looking into creating a solution to make all of that happen to allow having DIY voice assistant hardware that also works as a music speakers and/or audio player recievers with external speaker for Music Assistant.

Users need some kind of native media player(s) is needed for both ESPHome on ESP32 and Wyoming voice satellites on Raspberry Pi type hardware that is available as a player provider for Music Assistant.

Nabu Casa is known to be working on an official ”voicekit” hardware with audio output (AUX jack) to enable connecting external speakers that will be made available later this year.

As such the usecase if deffinitly there.

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No doubt but the work required is not happening in the MA project. If it happens in HA then the created media player should become available to MA.

772

Fundamentally MA is just another media centre, very much like LMS, Kodi, Plex, etc., etc. creating its own database. Major differences being a closer integration with Home Assistant than its competitors; and that it is designed primarily for streaming media.

I was looking at MA since (a) I don’t currently use any of the other music systems and don’t want to duplicate databases and (b) I am hoping for easy integration with Voice Assistant.

In other words, Jivelite is unable to connect to MA.
I guess the answer is to run a web browser on my music player device (preferably in kiosk mode) to display the Music Assistant web interface.

Yeah, after several weeks I came to that conclusion.

773

I have all my music ripped in a single SMB folder.
I would like to know if there is a way in Music Assistant to avoid scanning/scraping certain subfolders via:
a file: .nomedia
a configuration line like:…/notthisfolder1/,notthisfolder2/,thisfoder/butnotthissubfolder/.
Or a exclude.yaml file
whatever?

Documentation does state wants stuff more or less like Kodi. But does not act as kodi (.nomedia doesn’t work f.e.).

When using kodi and foobar I have no problem, but in MA some various artists albums and other music have created hundreds of entries of Artists and Albums empty of with one song.

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No that isn’t currently possible. There is a task on the backlog to allow some more control but no ETA for that can be given

775

TYVM, we will have to wait then. I love the integration and how it makes sonos (pfff) and other components work together!

BTW I suffer the “configuration page at start” bug, even with the latest version. There is no way I can make it jump to the albums on startup. Even after completely uninstalling from HACS :frowning:

776

Hi, was wondering could MA detect this as speaker?
it seems to support multicast.
Do i also need pbx speaker if it supports multicast?

Manual is here :

A bit pricey, but not as expensive as denon AVR that is compatible with HA…

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It’s being looked at. The devs have been on holidays

Edit: as for that speaker I don’t think it would be supported at the moment

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Unfortunately, I also can’t use this addon with Alexa. In other words, I can’t choose Alexa to play the music!! Please, what is the way for us to pressure Amazon to accept URL stream???

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Fantastic integration which allows me to link my Sonos and Denon speakers. Much appreciation to the developers.

I’m not sure if I’m missing something, but whenever HA reboots I have to reload “Plugin provider” and then “Player providers” (which show an hourglass symbol until reloaded) - otherwise the players are not recognised. This isn’t a major issue, but more of a nuisance.

The log file shows once reloaded:
2024-08-07 23:34:26.590 INFO (MainThread) [music_assistant] Loaded plugin provider Home Assistant
2024-08-07 23:34:26.673 INFO (MainThread) [music_assistant] Loaded player provider Home Assistant MediaPlayers

Finally: Where is the log file saved or is there an easy way to delete it?

Thanks

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We have an item on the backlog to investigate the player provider issues.

Why would you want to delete the logs? MA recycles them as necessary

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Thanks for clarifying the provider issue so promptly. Regarding the log file, I changed the log level (in advanced settings) to verbose in order to see why I had to manually reload settings. I’ve ended up now with a pretty large and unwieldy file. Hopefully it will recycle to something smaller now that I’ve gone back to default settings.
Many thanks again.

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Thanks for clarifying, almost bought it…
Can you elaborate or perhaps is there another way to make it work with HA?
Cause there’s almost no other option for poe speakers…
cheapest HA compatible denon + 2 passive speakers costs more than 2 of those alone. Not to mention the electric bill of amps

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If you can tap off the power there then a raspberry pi running picoreplayer and plugged into that (if it can take a direct input) would be one solution. Alternatively there are esp solutions like this https://www.tindie.com/products/sonocotta/louder-esp32/

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Yep both rpi and esp32 work well with poe and can act as speakers.

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Does it also import all items from Jellyfin or does it just query Jellyfin if needed. Seems a bit of a waste to have 2 seperate music databases. My music database is about 600MB with 378 artists and multiple recordings for many of them.
Using Jellyfin integration I can play single songs via BrowseMedia but not a whole album which seems possible from MA.
So my solution at the moment is to have a seperate jellyfin page as a webpage-card where I can cast directly to the speakers.

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Support is provided for Plex, Opensonic and Jellyfin just to facilitate people who want both for some particular reason. Ideally you would cut out the middleman and use the MA file system provider. It will be faster and you dont have any limitations that may exist with the other providers.

Edit: specifically answering your question it pulls all data from the provider and then initiates playback through the provider as necessary.

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I haven’t bought the POE speakers actually, that’s why i asked here first…
I was interested due to it’s cabling simplicity and i happen to have some spare ports in my poe switch…
cmiiw, but with rpi / esp32 wouldn’t that mean i will need one each for each speakers, like this :

esp32 + poe speakers 1
esp32 + poe speakers 2,

how would i connect the ethernet to the esp32 then?
and if it needs additional power cable i would lose the simplicity of poe cabling…
might as well use passive speakers then ?

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Amazon is the first company to adopt the new “Matter Casting” (a.k.a. MatterCast) audio/music and video player (streaming reciever) for new/upcoming video and music cast standard protocol, so Music Assistant would need to support that in the future.

See this feature request for having support for that in Music Assistant here::

I also posted a feature request asking for a Home Assistant integration component too:

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