Today I had another great time trying to get Alexa (via MyMedia for local streaming) to play the music I wanted. What I wanted was Sulphur Aeon. What multiple tries in pronouncing it right for her resulted in was this:
| Heard | Band played |
|---|---|
| sypher eon | Atomic Neon |
| safaera | Frank Sinatra |
| sypher Evo | Devo |
| Safa aon | Sava |
| sci-fi aon | AION |
| salif aan | Can |
| sofaygo | ? |
| cipher ayo | DJ Copper Top |
I want to eventually replace her completely anyway, but I’m not there yet. But I have the hardware for one local smart speaker. Experiences like today helped me realize that depending on the band names one listens to, voice is an atrocious interface for requesting songs. Now the super easy solution would be a bluetooth speaker, but there’s one issue, I still need voice in the kitchen for handsfree unit conversion and timers. That means I need a way to mute the speaker with my voice, which means it somehow needs to be controllable by HA.
Requirements as a list:
- Speaker that either plays music from my phone, or directly from the Jellyfin server (that would be preferable)
- I need to be able to control it via phone or tablet
- HomeAssistant needs some kind of control as well, it doesn’t matter how much, but the minimum would volume control.
Note that I’m right-handed and have two left hands, so a solution that doesn’t involve soldering would be preferable.
Apparently Sonos/SYMFONISK are options, but those are pretty expensive speakers for what I need, and at least some cursory googling tells me that it has issues with Jellyfin because Sonos hates standards. Any other speakers that should work for this?
Take a look at Volumio… it can run on various hardware and has a plugin for Jellyfin and an integration for HA to control it.
So, in theory, that might work… but…
I run Volumio v2 on a RasPi3 with a DAC board to speakers. I have local (USB) music so I haven’t tried the jellyfin plugin, but it all works well.
My main hesitation is that the v3 software was so buggy and you need an account for plugins, that I just scrapped the upgrade and stayed at v2… so… try it, but it might be more trouble than it’s worth.
Thanks, I’ll have a look at it.
you need an account for plugin
What exactly does that mean? Registering and logging in once to install the plugin would be acceptable, having to have further internet access on the device would not be.
AFAIK, it was just to install, so yes, probably ok…
While the interface is atrocious, it works very well and was simple to setup :)
Have a look at Pi Core Player aka Logitech Media Player. Open source software server that you can run on anything, and just plug that into a speaker.
Hooks into HA, can run on an app on your phone (there’s an f droid app for android)
Thanks, is my understanding correct, that I’d need an extra server, though? And it can’t just support Jellyfin as streaming source (e.g. via DLNA)?
I’ve never used jellyfin myself but I assume you’re running it and Home Assistant on something. I don’t know what that something is, Proxmox, Docker, your PC, separate raspberry pis…
So the answer to your question is: I have no idea so I did a quick Google and got this, that seemed to answer your question for me.
What I’ve done by commenting is given you some new words to research
Pi Core Player (PCP)
Logitech Media Player (LMS)
and another one is Squeezebox
I discovered it when I was looking for some way to make a whole home music system using what I already had, because I’m a broke Yorkshireman and don’t want to pay for things.
I used it to have a way to cast music to 3 Google home minis (which were the things that brought me to LMS, nothing else could see them that was Open Source) and a couple of Pis, one of which was running Home Assistant.
I had HA Supervised in a Docker install somehow. So I just made that Pi, the 4b and my most powerful, run a Squeezebox Server. I put the “Player” software on a 3b in my bedroom and plugged it into some old computer speakers, had the 4b running server and player plugged into an old Bose surround sound system in my kitchen.
Then I managed to put PCP onto a pi Nano W and connected it with Bluetooth to my soundbar.
I could then play Spotify, YouTube and my own music in every room at the same time, and use it in HA to play rain sounds in my bedroom at night, also a sleep playlist when my kids go to bed (of course I’ve automated the kids bedtimes…)
I’ve recently moved from the Docker HA to HAOS which is WAY more stable, after an error I just couldn’t fix, and no longer have LMS installed. But it’s on my list.
Edit: I posted a bit about it on Reddit when I first got it installed, so you’ll probably see my name as you travel the path. It’s a bit of a fun one, lots of things that have shit documentation, enjoy!
Thanks, so it looks like it does need LMS. Which is just a huge amount of complexity for a single speaker. I don’t need multi-room audio or even multiple speakers. It’s literally one speaker in the kitchen, and I do have a media server set up.
It’s not very complicated, in my opinion. LMS can be installed inside HA as an add-on. I also have a separate music server (Navidrome) but I just pointed LMS to the same directory that Navidrome uses, and boom, control of all my music through HA.
The only caveat that I can think of is that your HA install needs to be able to see your music directory. In my case, I run HAOS in a Proxmox VM, so I just installed the Samba Share add-on.
It’s not that it’s hard to install, it’s that it’s another running part. I have some pretty low end hardware, I’d much rather have a solution that doesn’t need a redundant server.
One issue you’ll run into is that HA can’t stream music over Bluetooth (or couldn’t a few months ago), so you will have to go with a wifi speaker or preamp, or a separate server to stream the audio to a Bluetooth speaker. Or find a python package that you can incorporate into HA through the app daemon add on, or a docker image to run as an add on.
You can probably use HA to do the voice processing and send the command to the streaming server, but I haven’t played with the voice feature enough to tell you how much of a pita it would be to set it up to reliably be able to decipher a band, album, or song from a voice command. I do know that it’s a hassle to do it in rhasspy (you have to specify each option, iirc).
Once you do get it set up, you can probably set up a custom media player entity to control playback.
I’ve been checking on native HA Bluetooth streaming on a regular basis, because I want to design a whole home audio system that will follow me from room to room.
You misunderstand. I don’t want my voice for music selection anymore ;) All I want is for HA to be able to mute the speaker when I want to use my voice for something different. Bluetooth is not even a preference, that would only be the worst case of streaming from my phone instead of Jellyfin.
Oh, then that’s super simple with the media player entity.
But wouldn’t that bring me back to my question of what speaker to use?
Mute the speaker or its source? Muting source can be done easy with batch scripts and or an API I’d say.
There’s some fun stuff like ssh with a command in a string to a machine to execute the command. The sender would be your HA device or that you tell “mute”
I don’t really mind either way, but I feel like you and sibling commenter are thinking of something obvious that is eluding me: What speaker do I get?
The same as you have already?
Alexa? :D
