This would be great for speakers (in conjunction with the anticipated growth of music assistant) but also for headphones.
Together with Bluetooth proxies there would be no limit to listening on speakers in any room of a house.
Cheers
Great idea! I would really like to use it to let my kids listen to music in their bluetooth headphones without sacrificing the audio of my phone (which I would like to use myself without messing up their music). Controlling them through Music Assistant would be great!
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Also it is so much cheaper to ist Bluetooth than Sonos. And if we think about their recent app issues and cloud dependency I would really appreciate a Bluetooth solution
I have many ESPHome BT proxies in all Rooms. I have many BT Speakers. They support 4 active BT connections. So it would really nice to connect my Speakers to use them as Media-Sounddevices in HA.
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Yeah, this is really a WTH item, I thought after the year of the voice this would have been implemented, but nothing. I would really appreciate a ‘scan’ function that lists all possible devices. Just like you can do on your phone.
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There’s a misconception that because you have a Bluetooth dongle in the back of your HA machine you should be able to pair it with speakers etc. as you can a mobile phone.
Actually, the dongle and the related integration just provide the communication channel - you might as well say that because it has wi-fi capabilities HA should be able to stream movies.
At the very least there would have to be an integration (like the Sonos one), and I suspect that the fact that nobody has written one yet means that this is not a trivial matter.
Also, an esp is usually configured as a BLE proxy and not an active Bluetooth connection by default, and when it’s configured as active, it only allows 3 simultaneous connections. A2DP isn’t currently implemented in esphome, so this would also need to be added to support esp media player via Bluetooth on a proxy.
Not to mention that many of the esp32 designs don’t allow WiFi and Bluetooth to be active at the same time.
That’s true. If it was dead easy it would exist already, however, the rest I disagree with. HA is great because of is versatility, if an add-on or integration would provide a nice bridge to music assistant you had all you could ask for.
I see enormous potential there, which does not mean it’s simple to be done. But exactly that form of brainstorming is what WTH is good for
That’s a good point, not every device would be suitable but if it was just for all the accidentally available ESPs that come with the Shelly devices it would already be great. If you have 1-3 sockets/plugs with them in a room there is plenty of pairing availability.
For me 3 simultaneous connections are plenty, if you have 2 devices per room I struggle to imagine a reasonable scenario how to max 6 connections out.
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So, what would you guys/girls suggest, if one has a bluetooth speaker and would like to have a voice assistant sounding on that speaker (on a RPi4)?
Here’s a small list of tutorials, and they all seem to get stuck somewhere, whether it is that the /etc/asound.conf file being a read-only system file or the pactl command not available, and I’m not sure if I would want to install that?
https://marklewis.blog/2021/02/25/home-assistant-bluetooth-speaker/
Do I need to buy another device to make this work?