You broke my favourite automations and I want them back!

The decision to deprive Squeezebox HA users of the sync and unsync commands and replace them with the media player join and unjoin commands has resulted in a step backwards for this platform. Prior to this breaking change, I had a fantastic set of automations that, when triggered, would sync my squeezeboxes, mid-track, when I would leave one room and enter another with a squeezebox. Now, the join only happens once the current track stops playing and a new one begins. This is fine, I suppose, if youā€™re used to listening to a playlist full of 3 minute-long bubble-gum pop, but itā€™s a massive disappointment for anyone used to listening to three-hour-long DJ sets. Or a symphony. Or anything longer than a 3 year-oldā€™s attention span.

You broke it! It was perfect and you replaced it with a dud. Give it back ya vandals! I donā€™t care why you did it. Stop breaking things that were not broken!

Itā€™s enough to make a man release the hounds

So the PR which added the change you are complaining about is here

Iā€™m looking at it and nothing changed except the name. The code that was in the async_sync method (which is what squeezebox.sync called) moved to the async_join_players method. Itā€™s identical code though. Nothing in here suggests waiting for the track to finish or any waiting at all.

Iā€™m also confused by your timing. This change was made two releases ago. Since then hereā€™s what the code has been if you called squeezebox.sync:

It literally just calls join players after logging a deprecation warning. It hasnā€™t changed since this was made.

So are you just getting around to reporting this or are you noticing some new behavior? Because if youā€™re noticing new behavior now then its not caused by HA. Something mustā€™ve changed on squeezeboxā€™s side.

Ah ha! I think I know what the problem is now. Until quite recently, I had my Squeezebox Duet receiver attached via its LAN port to a Huawei WiFi 6 which I use as an access point in the master bedroom. I was getting WiFi dropouts due to its close proximity to a secondary mesh router so I shifted it into the den and reconnected the Duet to the network via a new network switch connected to the secondary mesh routerā€™s solitary LAN port. It might very well be in an IP conflict with another device that wants its IP address.

That was the receiver that I was using to reproduce the problem as originally described, so that seems a good bet to me. Iā€™ll perform some further tests when I get home and if the problem is then resolved by my tinkering, I shall throw myself on the mercy of this court for the false accusation made to our mighty programmers.

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