With the recent announcement that Music Assistant (MA) has been gifted to the Open Home Foundation and is to become a core component of the Home Assistant ecosystem, has there been any thought on implementing first-class support for AmpliPi controllers in MA?
I get the feeling that MA is going to become a very big part of HA in the coming months/years and having support for AmpliPi controllers might be the icing on the cake in terms of a standardised and easy-to-use control layer.
The current HA integration is functional but it is not very user-friendly for a non-techy person - i.e. partners and children. Having a single pane of glass for searching and selecting music (i.e. MA) which you can then send to any device in your smart home (including AmpliPi zones) would be the holy grail IMO.
Interested to hear if there are others who use MA or are considering switching to it in this group?
I can share that we definitely are interested, though I haven’t looked into this far enough to be able to tell you what demands this would make on our end to give a proper time estimate. Currently we’re giving the HA plugin some general polish and once we’re done with the more general fixes this is one of the higher-priority next steps after that!
I’ve been using it through the LMS/Squeezebox/Slimproto integration.
Overall, it works pretty well, there is one major bug that needs addressed, if my Home Assistant was running on a Pi, it would absolutely destroy the SD Card.
Interesting, how do you have your system setup exactly? I am running LMS on a different machine, with an LMS client on my AmpliPi. That all works pretty well, but if I try and add the SlimProto integration to MA it doesn’t find any players or devices.
Thanks for the details. For some reason it is not working for me.
With your setup like this, you can easily send music to be played on your AmpliPi stream (using MA), but how do you control which zones are playing that stream?
Does that still need to happen thru the AmpliPi app or do you use HA?
I exclusively use HA. I rarely go into the AmpliPi interface.
In HA, there’s a media_player entity for the LMS client that was configured and all the zones have media_player entities. In HA I automate setting the Source on the Zone, using its media_player entity, to be the LMS client and that’s how I do any grouping I need to do.
Ok cool - I can see how you can do all that using hand-cranked automations, but how do your users interact with the system - i.e. partners, children, guests?
It is quite convoluted getting them to select something in Music Assistant to send to the LMS client (i.e. AmpliPi source) and then they have to move to Home Assistant to select which zones are playing that source.
I have been trying to come up with a streamlined way for non-techie users to easily control the music in our house and have been struggling . Very interested to hear how others might have solved this tho.
I’m trying to come up with ways where I could ask Siri to play audio in certain rooms through HA…it’s been hard to figure out and I’m not being super successful yet. I’d love to be able to say “Play Spotify in the Living Room at 50%” or something like that and it would play the spotify source in the living room at 50% volume.
. Very interested to hear how others might have solved this tho.