Hi Everyone,
I wanted to take the time to announce that I am releasing today the first build of Spotcast V5. I have been hard at work in the last 3 months doing a full rewrite of the Spotcast integration to modernise it and improve it as much as possible. This new version is bringing a lot of improvements in the way Spotcast works, while also bringing this integration to the modern Home Assistant with web interface configuration and ability to re-authenticate without reboot.
I’m at a point where I won’t be able to find improvements or bugs anymore and need the help of the community to stress test the heck out of it. So for any one interested, you can download the latest build in pre-release in HACS (at the moment of writing, we are at 5.0.0-b4.
Some of the improvements in the current version of the beta are:
- a very significant improvement in start playback delay (from 15-2- to 1-2 seconds from personal experience)
- Rewrite of the core system with its own OAuth manager
- Separation of Spotcast functionalities is separate services
- Rebuild of the websocket API
- Creation of Spotify connect device media_players
- Creation of Service Sensors
- Creation of a configuration flow to enable configuring Spotcast from the UI
- Creation of an option flow to permit modifying options without restarting Home Assistant
- Creation of a reauth process for when credentials expires
Also in the backlog, we have a new logo to go with the release pending approval from the ha-brand repository.
If anyone is interested, please download the beta, try it, try to break it and send me feedback.
Hope everyone will enjoy this new step forwards for Spotcast.