Music Assistant 2.0: Your Music, Your Players

synergy1281 · February 28, 2025, 2:32pm

Thanks. In my case I already have Control4 with an EA5 (the brain) and a Triad 16x16 audio matrix that sends streams from the EA5 to amps powering 14 zones (the amps consist of two Triad 8-zone multi-amps). It’s all in a rack with speaker connections run centrally.

I like Control4 but it has its shortcomings, not least of which is having to call my integrator for every change, and MA’s library management is far superior to what I can do in C4. Also, the EA5 does not support Apple Music, which I want.

I now have Home Assistant integrated with C4 and that’s working pretty well for lighting control. Unfortunately, Music Assistant cannot control the C4 audio zones as I hoped, so I am looking for a way to bridge that gap.

I could put 14 RPi players and DACs in the rack and jettison the matrix, but it’s working fine and I only need two different streams running on various zones at any given time, so since I will keep C4 for now, I’m thinking of building a dashboard in HA that allows MA to control music selection and which of the two streamers to use (so MA would see just two players rather than 14), then let C4 control the actual zone selection (I.e., the matrix) and output volume.

I think I could accomplish that with two RPi players that sit between MA and the matrix, but if I’m on the right track with all this, I wonder if using two Bluesound Notes instead would add anything useful. It would get me really good DACs at a minimum.

OzGav · February 28, 2025, 9:53pm

Sounds like that would work. The RPi solution would be way cheaper. I think it would depend on how good are those speakers that are connected and would you notice the difference with the Node vs, for example, a HifiBerry hat?

nickrout · February 28, 2025, 11:35pm

There are great dacs for pi. Unlikely to be a problem.

bfry · March 1, 2025, 6:40am

If you think filing the issues is “effort”, imagine actually doing something to solve them.

Zero-Circle · March 2, 2025, 3:27am

Hi guys is there a way to have music assistant show up in the HA default browse media modal?

Alternatively am I able to somehow substitute the browse media button with MA?

I made a thread here but have been directed here to ask this question

OzGav · March 2, 2025, 8:27am

Yes just select a MA player entity. Edit: you won’t see a MA icon but you will see all the MA categories and can browse them

Zero-Circle · March 2, 2025, 9:56am

Sorry can you please elaborate on this?
Yes to adding MA to the browse window?

OzGav · March 2, 2025, 10:42am

The MA integration has created a number of media player entities.

In the bottom right of the HA media view you can select a media player entity. If you select one that was created by the MA integration then you will see the icons in the view change to include ones that allow browsing of the MA library.

harryfine · March 2, 2025, 3:21pm

Question. If I want automations to action play music from sets of speakers based on automation conditions, should I:

Group MA individual speakers using HA helpers for every desired group;
Group in player groups in MA and action the MA group, or;
In the automation action each MA speaker entity separately?

Thank you

tanderson1992 · March 6, 2025, 1:36pm

I’m not sure if this is an MA issue or a Chromecast one. I’ve been using my group of a nest mini speaker and a Chromecast audio. I’ve found that sometimes after playing music to the group for a while, the individual players are gone from the list of “All Players” in MA. I have to restart the add-on to allow me to see the players and transfer the group queue to one of the individual players. Worse, last night it wouldn’t let me stop the group player, presumably because it couldn’t see the individual players that make up the group. I didn’t see a bug report and figured I’d check here first before making one.

OzGav · March 6, 2025, 2:35pm

It is normal for the individual players to disappear when the group is powered on. When the group is powered off they will reappear. Not being able to power off the group player is not normal.

tanderson1992 · March 6, 2025, 5:00pm

Thank you. Now that I understand it more, I’ll be cognizant when I try to stop it next (I’m playing to a group right now). I think I might have introduced errors trying to transfer the queue to a single player in the group. I’ll try stopping playback and re-starting on the individual player.

Neil_Brownlee · March 7, 2025, 9:06am

As someone suggested I’d put this in the wrong place (feature request) I’ll add it here too

I’m trying to move over to MA from the now unsupported Linkplay (HACS) integration. One of the things that I miss (because I listen to radio) is the ability to get the artwork from LastFM.

Would it be possible to add this in? All the code exists in the current Linkplay (HACS) integration. If we could get that working then I could switch to the featureless core Linkplay integration and use MA to provide the missing features.

OzGav · March 7, 2025, 10:42am

Not sure who sent you here. Feature requests go here music-assistant Feature Requests And Ideas · Discussions · GitHub

Neil_Brownlee · March 7, 2025, 10:45am

Thanks, I’ve added it there

madbrain · March 7, 2025, 11:49pm

You are way out of line with that comment.

Hundreds of thousands of people in the US, and many more worldwide, work as QA/QE. They get compensated, because doing QA is actually work, and doing that job takes time.

Most in the MA and HA community volunteer their time. If you had bothered to look at the issues reported against MA, both open and closed, you would have seen that I reported quite a few, many with long lists of steps to reproduce, logs and test cases. I easily spent dozens of hours doing so last year, if not hundreds, for no money. Many of the problems are intermittent and not easy to reproduce, which is why so much time was required.

Finally, reporting an issue is very much doing something about it. Unreported issues are likely unknown to developers, and they just cannot fix issues they don’t know about. Just because I’m not contributing code at this time doesn’t mean the reports are not helpful and don’t help increase the product quality.

Gurulee · March 8, 2025, 12:20pm

Please someone, somehow, some way, add support for Amazon music as a provider.

nickrout · March 8, 2025, 8:00pm

You keep saying that. Repeating yourself won’t make it faster.

Patrch · March 8, 2025, 8:00pm

I put the following into configuration, but was told maybe and likely it is more of interest here - basically an issue playing a radio stream and work around I am using, so here goes!

link to previous post:

Music assistant error Player does not support enqueueing - work around?

apparently not many people are running into this as my searches have been so far fruitless but for us using music assistant about every 5-10min it stops on the player we are using (an old fire 7 with fully kiosk ) and particularly on a radio stream.

error which get repeated various numbers of times:

music_assistant_models.errors.UnsupportedFeaturedException: Player Fire Tablet does not support enqueueing
2025-03-07 19:50:35.872 ERROR (MainThread) [music_assistant] Error doing task: Task exception was never retrieved
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/app/venv/lib/python3.12/site-packages/music_assistant/controllers/player_queues.py", line 1454, in _enqueue_next_item
    await self.mass.players.enqueue_next_media(
  File "/app/venv/lib/python3.12/site-packages/music_assistant/controllers/players.py", line 766, in enqueue_next_media
    raise UnsupportedFeaturedException(

in trouble shooting if the device supports “flow mode” which i have not found more info on then maybe it would work and some reference to a player compatibility list which I think is this: Player Support - Music Assistant (?)

seems the player does not apparently support enqueueing … so what is one to do?

well I just found a dirty band aid - the following automation at least keeps us from having to press play every 5min or so

automation code if someone is interested, just was a ui built automation but glad it worked!

alias: on radio idle play
description: ''
triggers:
  - device_id: a20_insertyourshere
    domain: media_player
    entity_id: 3356sss_insertyourshere
    type: idle
    trigger: device
conditions:
  - condition: state
    entity_id: input_boolean.created_switch_to_just_have_it_play_this_forever
    state: "on"
actions:
  - action: music_assistant.play_media
    metadata: {}
    data:
      media_id: radio channel you want to play
      enqueue: play
      media_type: radio
    target:
      device_id: 338e8a_insertyourshere
mode: single

it takes a few seconds when it replays but certainly there is a better solution?

hopefully there is before I start building out the automation (if possible ?) to check if it was on radio then to play the same thing or a playlist to play the next song. . seems like I am building an assistant to the music assistant

I can of course report it officially if that is what should be done, but I am not sure honestly sure what is the root cause, but it seems to be music assistant as it seems to enqueue fine with a playlist (but maybe that is not enqueueing ?)

Skyman1 · March 10, 2025, 10:13am

after updating music assistant to version 2.4.4 it no longer worked. I restarted HA but nothing. The integration seems to work in the add-ons but in the we interface it is no longer reachable. The players in homeassistant do not work. Do you have the same problem?

I restored the previous backup with 2.4.3 and everything is working again. Do you know if there are any problems with 2.4.4?

thanks.