Music Assistant & existing media players

Configuration
1

I’m looking for some guidance or best practise for Music assistant.

I have the MA integration in HA
I have media players already in HA (Sonos and others)

I believe I’m right (correct me if I’m wrong) in thinking that if I add my HA media players into MA I will end up with two ‘versions’ of every media player (in HA at least).

Is the consensus to keep both and if so why?
Or do you remove one set and just keep one?

This question is based on the memory of a very historic installation of MA a few years ago when it first come out. The duplicate media players at the time seemed a bit odd and ‘untidy’ and between then and now I have removed and reinstalled MA so currently have them once in HA and once in MA.

I think the time has come to ‘trust’ MA as my primary music controller but I want to get a few things straight in my head first.

I use media players extensively in HA for tts announcements if that changes anything.

2

I’ve personally found it easiest to let MA grab all my media players via ‘Player providers’, expose those to HA, and let MA handle everything. Yes there are doubles for these but I just ignore the HA created ones. You can still use the MA created ones for tts targets. The caveat is that MA needs to be running full time for those media players to be available, not an issue for me.

If you’ve already got automations and scripts using your current ones there’s really no reason to edit them for MA targets I don’t think, although MA might handle audio ducking on its own entities… I haven’t tried this myself.

FWIW I’m running MA beta full time.