Would love to hear real experience, what do you use for your ESP speakers as a server for your local music library?
With the Home Assistant’s standard tools we can play files one by one, it can’t play a folder or playlist, and I understand why.
Music Assistant doesn’t support playback on ESPHome speakers.
Many services such as Plex are based on third party sites. I have a local music library and don’t want to depend on a third party site to listen to it.
So, I’m looking for a solution:
a completely local and standalone;
that doesn’t use paid or third-party services;
that supports ESPHOME speakers;
with playlists, random playback, by artist, genre, all the usual stuff.
Is there no such thing, or am I looking in the wrong place?
LMS and PicorePlayer is probably the most flexible and has bridges to most platforms. Squeezelite installed on players is the best solution. I do not use ESPHome speakers and would need some research.
Thank you for your reply. Yes, I have researched that Squeezelite gives more possibilities as a media player. But on the other hand, ESPHome allows you to make not just a speaker as a source of music and voice messages, but also to embed climate sensors, buttons, LED indicators for notifications and statuses, time or weather displays, voice assistant and so on. As far as I understand, Squeezelite is a firmware with fixed features, while ESPHome allows a lot of customizations. By assembling ESPHome firmware from components I can make a very flexible device in its functions and settings.
Might be worth joining some of the other threads. I think a lot of other people are doing the same thing. You have got me interested and will investigate. I have around twenty speakers/ players in my LMS network; I need to expand my knowledge
Well, it’s just a weird position to be in. Home Assistant created Voice Assistant as a great alternative to off-the-shelf smart speakers. It’s not hard to make such a device yourself from very cheap components, and that’s great, especially since it can all work autonomously without using any brand’s cloud services. But at the same time, the use of such a homemade speaker is limited by the fact that I can’t make it play music from my collections, as it can’t play playlists. All that can be successfully used at the moment are streams of internet radio stations.
You have to agree, this lack of functionality can be frustrating, as it feels like an unfinished product. I’m looking for solutions, but so far I haven’t found any movement in that direction. Of course, everything depends a lot on the developers of Home Assistant and ESPHome.
I understand that to play playlists obviously you need to know at least the current playback position, track duration, which is not implemented now. All Home Assistant does is to send a link to the media file to ESPHome speacer and does not (and cannot) control further playback. All we see is the status: play or idle. We can’t see why the status has changed. We don’t see the tags of the media file, we generally don’t know what media file is currently playing if the speaker has a play status. And this is a dead end for use with most media servers. Unless they create a continuous stream from the folders we specified. In fact, we have to create some sort of our own internet radio station.
Or ESPHome speaker will at least start letting us know what it is doing at the moment, more than just play or idle.