It’s just been a complete pain to go from having spotify play a playlist on my google speaker in the morning to an entirely locally run thing.
I have no clue why the media bit of HA is so bare because it feels like you are forced to use Music Assistant which I feel like should be a base thing and not something tucked away in the community HACS repository. On top of that the Jellyfin integration sometimes just didn’t work, the DLNA integration made media files have the song name of just the file path.
On top of that the actual automations just sort of suck, the default play audio automation isn’t useful when you have MA and even when I didn’t use MA it was annoying to pick a track to play in automations. MA automaitons are cool but don’t seem that intuitive at first and I don’t know if the queue in MA is the same as the queue in the regular HA media player controls??
Adding scrobbling was also a pain, because the jellyfin intergration does not report back songs being finished to Jellyfin you can’t use the lastfm jellyfin plugin and have to make sure it’s on Home Assistant itself, what a pain. There are two different community made things and both of them are very basic, one of them didn’t even work and the other one has a sort of hard to understand README. I still got it working but I just feel like it shouldn’t have been that hard to get working like why do I have to install python on my own machine I hate that I had to ask 2 different comp sci majors “how do I install pip”
and that’s not even mentioning all the time digitising CDs and setting up Jellyfin but that’s not Home Assistant’s fault.
It’s been sort of fun but I feel like the HA side of things is lacking. Playing music on my google speakers is what got me into smart home stuff but it’s been very hard to de google and I can’t see anyone else doing the same thing unless they realllyyy care.
I haven’t even looked into voice assistant stuff but im assuming that’s also a massive pain or impossible to get onto the same level as the google speaker out of the box.