Hi all, I’d like to refresh my music set up in the house. I have a couple of Bose Soundtouch 10 speakers that sounds good, and they do multi-room sync well, but the built-in software is rubbish. Its very fiddly and I frequently have to be reset and reconnect with the Wifi network, or delete and re-login to Spotify.
I’ve switched to the Music Assistant integration (from the Bose Soundtouch one) and connect the speakers via the UPnP/DLNA provider and that bypasses much of the Bose software nonsense, except they still get “lost” on the network and need to reconnect them again.
Can anyone recommend me either a speaker that plays well with Music Assistant (including multi-room sync) or maybe a Wifi/receiver thing that I could connect to the Bose speakers via aux-in?
Ah! Any speaker that has your desired features will work for you.
Recommending more of those, they are compatible with HA and can receive music cast locally from Music Assistant. They seem to run reliably in my home but yeah, every two to three months, i have to power cycle them.
Also consider piCorePlayer (picoreplayer.org) on a Pi, connected to actively amplified bookshelves such as the JBL LSR 305. For best performance, use Ethernet cabling.
I like the sound of the Soundtouch speakers. At least to my 60-ish year old ears, they sound pretty good for their size.
Unlike you, though, I’ve had to more than just power cycle them periodically. I used the official Bose Soundtouch integration, but it has a number of limitations. For example, radio stations must have non SSL web sites because of the truly prehistoric TLS stack on the devices. The spotify app (also ancient) would periodically just stop working and I’d have to delete the app on the devices and recreate it (it doesn’t give an option to just re-login in). They also occasionally disappear from the network, and that could usually be solved by power-cycling, but sometimes I’d have to use Bose’s truly awful interface to re-connect with the Wifi.
When Music Assistant came along and could play anything I wanted through these speakers (via, say, the UPnP/DLNA provider), I thought I was saved, but the speakers disappeared from the network again and I had to re-connect… I’m fed up. I’m looking at yours and @BebeMischa’s suggestions, plus a recommendation on discord (from Music Assistant’s creator) for a Wiim Pro or Mini. Any of those could use the Soundtouch’s aux-in and just bypass all of this nonsense – I hope!
I’m really happy with my switch from SONOS over to the Yamaha MusicCast eco-system. It’s worked really effectively for me. More importantly, my wife loves it and it’s simple for her to use and understand. They make stand alone speakers, or many of their stereo or multi-channel surround receivers have it baked in and it just simply works.
SoundTouch cannot work correctly in DLNA mode, it responds with invalid XML to HA or other clients. Nonetheless i got it working reliably with Music Assistant casting in flow mode through HA Bose, even Spotify works perfectly.
Trouble with AUX is that it cannot turn the speaker on.
Hmm… I’m listening to them right now, without flow mode. Not sure what I did differently.
But, yes, I agree, Music Assistant is great and I’m really enjoying it. When the speakers work.
I also have a couple of Google Home/Nest speakers, but they’re only good for things like “Hey, Google, give me a five minute timer” or “What’s the weather tomorrow.” I rarely play music through them. Too small.
@eamonn
I’m a SoundTouch guy myself, 4 ST10’s and an ST300 sound bar with Bass module.
Regarding the network connectivity, have you tried defining static IP addresses for them? If not, that will probably solve your connection problems. It did for me. I have used them with both an older Linksys router, as well as a newer Wi-Fi 6 mesh router.
I would also recommend the SoundTouchPlus integration and SoundTouchPlus Card card for control. I wrote both of those custom components, as well as their underlying API’s. Note that these are different than the stock HA soundtouch integration.
These look fantastic! Of course, I discover this the day after I buy a pair of WiiM Mini pucks… (Those work really well with Media Assistant, too.)
I think I’ll use both and see how that goes. The pucks give me a lot of flexibility (can be attached to any speaker), and if these solve my control issues (e.g., picking Aux or whatever), I’ll be golden!
And, yes, they have static IPs, which did reduce the connectivity issues, but not eliminate them. I have a Wifi 6 router too.
@eamonn
I know others have confirmed Wi-Fi network issues with some of the older ST10 models, and I have confirmed that with my devices via tracing. Prior to upgrading to the mesh Wi-Fi 6 system, I was seeing all kinds of activity in the trace log for Wi-Fi signal strength events (e.g changes from poor to excellent and vice versa). I don’t see a lot of that now with the mesh router (Netgear Orbi) system.
I also run all my devices on the same subnet as my HOme Assistant image… I’ve heard others reporting issues if using more than one subnet.
Check out some of the custom services on the SoundTouchPlus integration. They allow you to switch to the various sources on the ST10 (AUX, SPOTIFY, PANDORA, TUNEIN, etc), as well as the ability to reboot the device if necessary. Plus all of the standard media player services (volume, pause, play skip track, etc).
Reach out if you have questions or issues with it, and I’ll try to help.
Thank you very much. I have been on a similar path with the connectivity issues. I have switched to a mesh set up as well, using Asus ZenWiFi AX. (I had other reasons for doing that too.) The two speakers also have static (well, assigned via DHCP) addresses and are on the same network.
All of these measures helped, but the last straw for me was the sporadic issues with Media Assistant. Some days they’d work, some days not. Restarting and/or re-pairing would usually, but not always, work. In hindsight (from a comment above) this was probably to do with incomplete/inadequate support for DNLA.
The WiiM Minis work flawlessly so far, but one ST10 (and only one ) requires that I manually switch the source to AUX when I first start playing on it. I use NodeRED, so I can automate that using your custom services.
(Those work really well with Media Assistant, too.)