Multiroom Audio with Home Assistant Voice PE

[indigo sun]

Will it be possible to have multi room audio playback via spotify with Home Assistant Voice PE? Ideally via exposing predefined groups as selectable devices in Spotify Connect.

This is the main feature that would hold me back from transitioning from Google Home to Assist.
Others would be the fact that I own a soundbar that has Google Assistant integrated and am unsure if and how well it would work when connecting HA Voice PE via Aux, and that Google Assistant can be used on my phone without even unlocking it to control devices. Also that Google Assistant can be used to create appointments and reminders in my calendar.

[fallen tusk]

Voice PE is nothing to do with this. It does expose its media player to HA, after that you have to find a way to play music on it. Music Assistant can help, and also group players - but i doubt it can expose those groups to Spotify Connect.

[fallen tusk]

You want too much. Google owns the operating system on your phone, and gets inbuilt into many vendor's devices just because it's Google.

[indigo sun]

Fair. I still would need for this functionality to exist to switch, since this is actually the main thing I use my voice assistants for. Saying stuff like "Play <some song> on Spotify everywhere".

[fallen tusk]

Well you can do this with Music Assistant, it's just not done through Sonos...

[indigo sun]

I guess this would be two independent feature requests then. One seems to already have been made at music assistant https://github.com/orgs/music-assistant/discussions/419 and the other one would be a way to start music assistant playback via assist voice commands (or is that already possible?).

Actually seems to be in the works currently at music assistant.

[fallen tusk]

Second is possible, with some tricly scripts 🙂 I use it.

[fallen tusk]

Nice, there you have it.

[indigo sun]

Would you be able to share that when you have some time?

[fallen tusk]

Uff, i doubt it will work for you 😦

There's like 6 scripts that are doing their job.

And LLM involved to refine user request

To pull track name / album / artist from plain speech

[indigo sun]

Okay that indeed sounds pretty complicated, but I think it would still be helpful for getting some inspiration 🙂

I would think that something like this might be implemented directly into assist at some point though. I certainly would hope so.

[fallen tusk]

Check this thread, i pasted everything there: #1314254769715675176 message

[pine parcel]

Spotify connect is coming to Music Assistant soon™

[fallen tusk]

That's really nice things. I'd rather have Android/iOS client for Music Assistant, since Spotify library can already be connected into MA... But i appreciate those people who just wants to play Spotify. 🙂

[pine parcel]

You can use Snapcast for android

[fallen tusk]

Snapcast app is deprecated. Also, Snapcast won't give me access to whole library and all players in Music Assistant. I want management tool, basically companion app. Great if it will be able to play music too, for sure.

[pine parcel]

The MA UI is a PWA so works on your phone to do all your management but “play to local device” is not yet available so you need Snapdroid for that. Not sure why you say it is deprecated the dev released an update only two weeks ago.

[fallen tusk]

Hmm, i was checking Snapcast. Right, Snapdroid will play - but without access to the library. I use MA UI in web on my phone - but it's super unintuitive to launch playback in one place and then listen in other app.
Also this way i never gonna get music in my car. 🙂

@pine parcel no offence to MASS - it is great! But for Android i use Finamp with Jellyfin library, and use same library in MA. This way i ensure i have single source of truth.

[pine parcel]

Whatever works for you

[fallen tusk]

Oh damn i didn't realize that i'm talking to MA contributor. Thank you guys for awesome work!

[proper sapphire]

This was working for me relatively well with MA and an LLM Agent https://music-assistant.io/integration/voice/.