Spotify: Manually add sources?

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Hey there,
I’m using a different Spotify account on my Echo devices than on my Home Assistant and PC so that my girlfriend can use the Echos without interferring with my Spotify account.

There is a cool feature for Echo devices though to switch temporary to a different Spotify account with a voice command (“Alexa, Spotify connect” or in german :“Alexa, Spotify verbinden”). It then shows up as an available device for anyone in the same network.

All my Spotify apps (PC and iOS app) show the new device then. Unfortunately my Home Assistant Spotify player can’t see the source unless I manually switch to it in another app (but then disappears again after a while). I wonder if I can manually add sources to Home Assistant’s Spotify player so that it is always “available”? Like a “force connect”, rather than relying on discovering it?

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Probably too late for @NicolasG, but for future reference:

The device issue is a known Spotify issue. This is because the Connect API does not have the context of the device. Although it would be nice to be able to provide the context on the call, but it’s not possible.

As such, the devices are unusable as sources on Spotify once they become idle.

I was looking for solutions:

  • Spotcast seems to claim that this is possible, but I have not tried yet.
  • Myself, I am exploring using Google Assistant to initiate a Cast session and then use the session for controlling it. However, this would require being able to use Google Assistant SDK via text/API and I am still not sure whether that’s possible.
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Hi I want to bump this thread, I have the same question are there anyone who has solved this?