I have just installed HA and, as one does, I’m having a play to find my way around. As I have a mature Logitech Media Server installation on my network, that seemed like a good place to start, so I installed the Squeezebox (LMS) Integration and sure enough I was quickly connected and can play to my players. Great!
But…
I’m struggling with what appears to be a lack of distinction between “Artist” and “Album Artist”. This integration seems to only have the former and not the latter, which is a huge shame. My library, for example, has 2045 Artists but only 348 Album Artists. Browsing the latter works, but the former is just too long to be useful. In fact, in this integration, the “Artist” list only goes up to “J” in the alphabet (an unfortunate size limitation somewhere?).
There is a workaround - if I tell LMS to dumb itself down and construct only one Artist List, then what you get is what used to be the Album Artist list and things now work better. But in the process I have diminished the flexibility of the native system, which is a huge shame.
Worse, if I browse through Genres - select a Genre (say, Symphony) and you get a list of all the Artists who have any tracks tagged with that genre. Select one, say Beethoven, and you then get a list of all of the Albums associated with that Artist, regardless of whether its tagged with the Genre I started with. Which makes the Genre option pretty much useless? (It would be ok if and only if any given Artist were only associated with one Genre, which might well be true for a limited set of music but not in the general case).
Have I missed something?
Many thanks for your comments and patience…
Hello @Hillman10 I am in the same position. However, I decided to maintain my existing LMS standalone system because it worked, it was not clear that running LMS inside of HA was a good experience and I could manage my file system separately, but what I did was:
created an iframe of LMS; so I could display my material skin with HA dashboard directly
created an automation from HA that picked up when I was playing music and switched on the amps when required (used HA DLNA Digital Media Renderer)
So sorry I am not replying to your question, but will watch if you get a reply to what is a LMS question.
hi - thanks for the response. I have no intention of running LMS inside HA, I just wanted to use the integration to see if I could get a single interface to manage it and all the other stuff in the house (which is kind of the point of HA, no?). And my question is not about LMS, it is definitely about limitations of the integration!
Having said that, as a complete newbie I am interested in both the actions you’ve taken - could you give me some pointers?
I’m using LMS with a few clients and do ‘nothing’ with the media part in HA regarding music.
The part I do use is controlling playback and volume through automations & scripts, which works wonderful.
I have a few wireless remotes, connected over zigbee, that I use to control multiple players at the time.
I think you have to make a choice whether you use LMS or HA as the core for your music.
I agree with @Nick4. As mentioned; i have used an iframe to allow my EXISTING LMS Material web interface to appear in HA. LMS is not running in HA but I am able to show the external web page to make it a more smooth experience
Edit: iframe does NOT work if you try to view the page from outside of your home network. But that is the case with LMS anyway.
That’s understandable and I wrote my experience just to give you an idea about how someone else might handle this.
I have seen the most crazy integrations of stuff into HA and it’s up to everybody how you use HA.
For me, the most important is to automate the house to make it smart and not to have a fancy dashboard so I can drool on it or show off, therefor my dashboards are very basic.
For LMS I use the material app on a tablet (which also has the HA companion app) in case I want to control what is playing and the IKEA remotes control volume (increase/dim/mute), stop/start playback or next song.
HA does also control playback, volume based on different events.