You need to try forked-daapd if you are an iTunes user, Airplay user, or interested in playing local music

Third party integrations
83

Unfortunately no, this was the behavior when I used the iTunes integration (which had tons of problems), but now with owntone (forked-daapd), it only selects the playlist and you have to press play separately. You could, I think make an automation that triggered on a playlist being selected and pressed play for you, though.

84

Thanks for your reply and confirming the behaviour of this.

I have done some research and finding it difficult to find how to setup that automation. In its simplest form, media should atomically play when selecting an option from the source.

Anyone know how I could make that happen?

Or could I integrate this into Lovelace? For example including two call services upon button press? One for selecting the playlist and the two pressing play. I have tired the below but it is not working.

entity: media_player.owntone_server
type: custom:mini-media-player
source: icon
artwork: full-cover
group: true
hide:
  shuffle: false
  icon: true
  power: true
  source: true
  name: true
shortcuts:
  columns: 3
  buttons:
    - name: Heart Test 
      type: service
      id: media_player.media_play
      data:
        - service: media_player.select_source
          data:
            source: HeartLondonMP3 (playlist)
          target:
            entity_id: media_player.owntone_server
        - service: media_player.media_play
          data: {}
          target:
            entity_id: media_player.owntone_server
85

Moin,

I have been following this topic for some years now as I was always skeptical how to sync my various devices. First, I had to move all my media back into the “itunes Media” folder (that was on another harddrive, since hard drives especially SSD used to be too small).

Nevertheless, I got the server to run inside a docker, solved the problems about starting it as a root user, it scanned my itunes DB and is alive now.
I have several problems now.

1) my smart playlists are gone, also none of the ratings were imported.
I think, maybe i have to let iTunes creat that xml file first? (yes it was).

  1. Using the web interface, i cannot get a nice overview of the titles. I used to sort them by date added, and meta data like rating was always important for an overview. The Web does not offer this. I found out that iTunes can access the server and Display the information, but then I cannot edit the tracks there.

  2. Now, all the smart playlists are now sort by Name instead of the folder structure I created in iTunes. Is there any way to mimic the folder structure?

  3. My playlist heavily depend on “last played” and “playcount”. Both seem not to be updated in the itunes DB after playing a song. I started iTunes afterwards, both fields have not been updated. If iTunes accesses the ownTone database, i cannot select to view last played, playcount etc.

  4. the order of the titles are completly different in Owntone compared to iTunes. This has to do with missing fields. I cannot change the order of the files.

All in all I really like the project. Especially since iTunes is dead, even though the latest version accessible via microsoft store gave a little improvement above the latest downloadable apple itunes version. For me it seems this iTunes server is more for sharing music with several persons than rather productivly keeping your playlist in shape. iTunes is still needed to maintain the DB, which is almost a “every day’s job”.