I have multiple amazon echos tied into HA via the Alexa media player HACS addon. Is there a way to have the universal media player or anything else control them all? I’m looking for something with a drop down to choose which player to control from a list.
This might be what you are looking for:
I have that but it doesn’t have a drop down selector. Unless I’m missing something.
I linked directly to that part.
Sorry links like that don’t work on mobile. I saw that but I don’t think it does what I’m looking for. I only want to see one player that I can choose what device it controls.
I guess the question is, based on the alexa_media_player custom component… what would you want to do to ALL of them at the same time?
Change Volume, perhaps?
For playing music, it doesn’t work that way. If you manually tell each device to play spotify, it’d play on one, then the next, then the next. If you’re trying to get multiple speakers to play the same music at the same time, you need to set up a speaker group and then play to that group (which you can do with alexa_media_player in a weird way). alexa_media_player will also expose a media_player device for each of your speaker groups allowing you to pause and such from there. For spotify, specifically, there is also the spotify component which gives a drop down of all the alexa devices in your home (and speaker groups) and let’s you choose where to play the music.
For TTS, the TTS in the media player card doesn’t work with alexa_media_player. There’s a documented method for doing this and targeting whichever devices you want.
So, I guess the straight answer is “no, there’s not a way to do that with universal media player”. But if you explain what it is you want more specifically (instead of “control them all”), there’s probably an answer.
That’s the thing. I don’t want to do anything on all of them at the same time. I want to have one media player that I can choose which device it controls via a drop down. For example, I’m playing Spotify in my bedroom and pandora in the kitchen playing a different song. I would like to be able to select the bedroom device from a list and be able to control that, then later select the kitchen device and be able to control that one.
Oooooh! So it’s purely a UI thing then.
You could use a regular input_select and a pile of conditional Lovelace cards. That should do the trick.
Yes purely UI. I haven’t messed with conditional Lovelace cards yet, still kinda new to HA. Is it a special type of card, or would it be a bunch of automations? Is there a link to documentation on how I should approach this?
Thanks for the idea, this sounds like what I’d want. I already tried setting an input Boolean as a media players source but apparently HA doesn’t like that. I don’t think it plays well with variables.
It’s a card type. So you’d set a condition on the input_select being a certain value to display a certain media player.
So if I’m reading this right, I need to create a conditional card for each player and have them displayed based on the input Boolean? Is there a way to combine them into a single card for the config?
I think I’ve figured it out using a combination of the entity-filter and the mini media player cards. Players only display if they are active which is exactly what I wanted. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction!
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