Official Support for HTD is coming!

hikirsch · January 4, 2025, 10:47pm

Hi Everyone -

I’m really happy to announce that for the past many months, I’ve been working with @S10XtremeNLow and HTD to officially bring not only the MCA66 to Home Assistant, but their Lync products as well!!

Both the Lync 6 and Lync 12 will be added as officially supported devices by this integration. I know there’s been a huge interest in this and I’m very happy I can announce this now and a plan as to which you all can expect.

This will be an official integration recognized by HTD. They have been amazing at helping me get support for everyone. We will continue to be working together to ensure that this integration thrives. My end goal is to merge this integration directly into Home Assistant core so we do not have to rely on HACS.

I have been really busy rewriting the integration from the ground up! Stability has been the center of it all and I must have gone through dozens of iterations of communicating with the gateway. I’m really proud at how good it’s become and I can’t wait to actually share it.

I will start a preview/beta period within the next couple of weeks so you all can get a hand on it and help me test it.

There are going to be some new notable features with this new version. The obvious being the same integration will support both MCA and Lync products out of the box.

The integration will support config_flow going forward, no more yaml configuration! Your HTD device will automatically get discovered via Home Assistant’s device detection and setup is even easier than before.

There are some other enhancements such as setting the bass, treble, balance, zone/source names and such that I will also be supporting.

The end result of the integration is a huge collaboration from lots of different people in the community, even some who have no idea they’ve been a huge help. So thank you to those who have made this possible.

Stay tuned!

UngluedChalice · January 5, 2025, 4:21am

Wow! Fantastic! I’d be happy to help test with my Lync 12 system!

Markus99 · January 5, 2025, 5:58am

Nice work and greatly appreciated @hikirsch!

amit1 · January 5, 2025, 11:06pm

That is amazing news! Thank you for your efforts. Happy to help test with my Lync 6 system.

Will it support media_player.play_media? It would pair beautifully with Music Assistant!

Super exciting!

hikirsch · January 6, 2025, 12:17am

Not at this time, it would be reserved for the MP3 player. what’s music assistant?

Noobitious · January 6, 2025, 12:54am

Excellent. Here is the Lync6 fork of all your previous work. I happened to be working on it today GitHub - Noobitious/htd-lync6-home-assistant: An integration for the HTD Lync12 Series for Home Assistant

cowboyup · January 6, 2025, 5:41pm

Very interested in this. I currently access HTD via Homebridge and the following plugin: Chad J Morgan / Homebridge HTD MCA-66 Plugin · GitLab

One challenge I found with the plugin was support for multiple systems. I have two MCA66 amps and thus two gateways.

But I found a work-around and for the most part this works great. Would be nice to have them in HAOS however.

harshl · January 6, 2025, 6:05pm

Thank you for letting us know hikirsch! I have a Lync 12 and would be more than happy to test or help out in any way I can.

Really looking forward to this. The HTD integration is by far the weakest point in my Home Assistant setup compared to where I came from in HomeSeer. This should put everything up ahead of what I had there with the exception of the Onkyo integration, which while not as nice, is still meeting my needs great.

Thanks again!

harshl · January 6, 2025, 6:06pm

Oh, also, while I don’t use it personally yet, this is Music Assistant. Looks pretty awesome.

hikirsch · January 7, 2025, 1:30am

Thanks for sharing! Yes, this is interesting, unfortunately the Lync/MCA devices would need to rely on some sort of Source for this to work. An automation could auto-select the source and such. But out of the box hardware wise, you’re not quite there for something like this. Look at the Wiim or another Cast device for support with your music service.

I’ll be reaching out to this thread hopefully soon with plans for testing. I love everyone’s interest. Hang tight, we’re almost there!

hikirsch · January 7, 2025, 1:31am

Sorry, I’m not an Homebridge guy. Can’t help here.

harshl · January 7, 2025, 5:13pm

100%

I use a couple of Chromecast Music devices with mine. They don’t sell them anymore, but they still work great and are a perfect match for an HTD system.

UngluedChalice · January 8, 2025, 2:03am

One thing I would love to do is use Text to Speech to play announcements over the speakers. However, currently when I try this I get an error. Do you know if the new integration will support this?

Entity media_player.living_room_speakers does not support action media_player.play_media.

hikirsch · January 8, 2025, 2:12am

I will be supporting that action but it will be to play media from the MP3 player attached to the device. These devices cannot support the use case you want directly. Like what I am suggesting to @harshl You need to source to stream th TTS to, choose that as a source, and then it should work.

amit1 · January 8, 2025, 1:58pm

@harshl I use a chromecast device as well. Works well to access Spotify Connect.

@hikirsch yes it’s almost like a limitation for certain setups with HTD since it requires a physical source for the music. I was hoping the new HTD integration would somehow bridge the gap since Music Assistant seems to be able to access Chromecast devices and makes use of media_player.play_media. Not sure how that would work though, but in theory it would give a user access and control of their Spotify library from within HA.
Your suggestion to look into the WiiM seems to be the same as using a Chromecast, unless I am missing something?
Without using Musci Assistant, HA provides access to the Chromcast, which in-turn essentially accesses my spotify library. I have basic control of the Chromecast from HA, but I still need to search Spotify using my phone. Not ideal but it works.

Looking forward to the native HTD integration.

hikirsch · January 8, 2025, 2:30pm

Yes, this is a physical hardware constraint that the HTD devices have. Yes the Wiim is identical to the Chromecast Audio.

harshl · January 9, 2025, 7:54pm

@amit1 At the risk of getting a bit off topic of this thread, have a look at the SpotCast integration: GitHub - fondberg/spotcast: Home assistant custom component to start Spotify playback on an idle chromecast device as well as control spotify connect devices

I use it to play Spotify playlists directly from Home Assistant. It references the playlist and sends it to the Chromecast of my choosing based on the automations I have written.

Now, back to HTD info!

XSilver · January 11, 2025, 1:20am

oh thats amazing! I was just scouring on ways to integrate my HTD Lync 6 into Home Assistant! I will be following this closely! One thing I really want is to be able to use the voice assistant input to be able to output alerts and stuff over the different speakers.

FordPrefect · January 11, 2025, 5:06pm

This is great news! I have been using the htd_mc custom integration for a couple of years and this will be an awesome next step.
Looking forward to this integration. Thank you!

amit1 · January 13, 2025, 3:17am

@harshl Thanks for the suggestion. I’ve been using the SpotCast integration for a while. Seems to work well, except that I have to select the player from within Spotify.

However, I am happy to report that Music Assistant can control this device beautifully. So I now have access to Spotify from within HA to search the entire Spotify library.

If you couple this with @hikirsch upcoming HTD integration, we should be able to create a great user experience for music streaming in the house via a dashboard and multiple streaming services.

Can’t wait to take it for a spin!

Indeed, now back to HTD info!