Just wondering if anyone’s running something similar — I’ve got a remote setup with no internet access at all. Music is stored on a local drive, Snapcast is running in a Docker container, and Music Assistant is on a standalone PC.
Two Raspberry Pis handle playback into my stereo systems and also run Pi3D PictureFrame for slideshows to the TVs (amazing project — worth checking out: GitHub - helgeerbe/picframe: Picture frame viewer for raspi, controlled via mqtt and automatticly integrated as mqtt device in homeassistant.).
The whole setup works, but I’ve found it challenging to keep music playback reliable and to reset everything cleanly if something locks up or loses connection. I’m particularly interested in how others manage reliability or recovery in a completely offline setup like this — no cloud services or external dependencies.
I like Music Assistant and think it’s a great project, but I do find the dashboard a bit tricky to navigate. The various built-in players are good, but they feel a little too compact for my needs. I mainly work from my PC or a tablet, so I’m aiming for something that’s simple and quick to use.
My concept is pretty straightforward:
- Choose a playlist or album easily
- Pick which players to output to (probably with depressable toggle buttons)
- Hit play and adjust volume as needed
- All the usual playback controls would still be available too
I’m also working on a Home Assistant dashboard that shows all my Music Assistant playlists as clickable tiles, similar to my photo gallery layout. The playlist data pulls in fine using a template sensor, but the frontend can’t dynamically parse the JSON, so I’m experimenting with a custom HTML/JS tile view instead.
Would love to hear from anyone running a similar offline setup — especially how you handle system resets, connection reliability, or automated recovery.