Music Assistant player/integration support in OpenVoiceOS?

[Hedda]

Will the OpenVoiceOS Foundation and this voice assistant operating-system also plan to feature a player for "Music Assistant" for playback?

• https://www.music-assistant.io

• https://github.com/music-assistant

Music Assistant server can be used stand-alone or as an add-on for Home Assistant and is made to support external/remote players:

https://www.music-assistant.io/player-support/

"Music Assistant is what I’d like to call a music library manager – it gives you full control of playing YOUR music on your players. Just like Home Assistant centralizes all your devices and services to work together, Music Assistant does the same with your music sources and smart audio-playing devices."

"The Music Assistant server is a free, opensource Media library manager that connects to your streaming services and a wide range of connected speakers. The server is the beating heart, the core of Music Assistant and it keeps track of your music sources. It must run on an always-on device like a Raspberry Pi, a NAS or an Intel NUC or alike. The server can access multiple music providers and stream to multiple player types."

It was orginally built for Home Assistant integration in mind but its server software can also be used stand-alone and used with other players.

Highly recommend that you all read this whole (very long and detailed) blog article about Music Assistant 2.0 if you have not already:

• https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2024/05/09/music-assistant-2/

PS: Also check out the Music Assistant integration for Home Assistant if you are or might be interested in home automation:

• https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/music_assistant/

[j1nx]

Thanks! Very much appreciated.

Like mentioned over at their discussion board. Will have a deeper look at it in the upcoming days. Keep you posted.

Pinging @JarbasAl as he can have a look about if and how this might fit into our media play framework.

[JarbasAl]

currently working on a jellyfin skill and planning into looking into navidrome next

added music-assistant to my TODO list, i'll give it a shot and see if there's potential for integration

[Hedda]

Great to hear! What is really awesome about the Music Assistant server is its ”Music Providers” and ”Player Providers” which acts like a middleware integration that could make it compatible with mosts popular audio source and most popular player ecosystems. Any media source as input and any media player as output, in theory.

• https://github.com/music-assistant/server/tree/dev/music_assistant/providers

They already have native "Music Providers" integrations (in Python code) for Jellyfin, Subsonic (and as such Navidrome), and many, MANY more;

• https://www.music-assistant.io/music-providers/

• Apple Music, Builtin, Deezer, iBroadcast, Jellyfin, Local Files, Plex, Qobuz, Radio Browser, SiriusXM, SoundCloud, Spotify
  Subsonic, Tidal, TuneIn, YouTube Music.

So maybe no need to reinvent the wheel?

As for the client I think the Slimproto (a.k.a Squeezebox) protocol is currently the most compatible open-source protocols on media player side:

https://www.music-assistant.io/player-support/

https://www.music-assistant.io/player-support/slimproto/

Music Assistant (partly) emulates a Logitech Media Server and has a full implementation of the Slim protocol (aka slimproto). This means you can use squeezebox players directly with Music Assistant. This applies to the original Logitech branded Squeezebox hardware players like the Radio and the Duet and any software variants of it like squeezelite which runs on almost any hardware, including your own desktop OS and even ESP32 boards.

Slimproto (a.k.a Squeezebox) Player Features:

• Slimproto devices are auto detected in Music Assistant
• Slimproto devices will play in sync
• Any physical control buttons on the device should be supported as long as flow mode is not enabled
• The player settings include some basic equaliser settings
• The player settings allow configuration of stereo pairs of speakers

[Hedda]

Note by the way, when it comes to media player for music playback recommend you consider going the same a architectural decision that the very latest ESPHome (which Home Assistant Voice PE now) uses has chosen with it new audio components and media players, which is to have totally separate media player (speaker components) for music from media player for announcements (voice repons) playback.

ESPHome new speaker media player component adds several features, but perhaps most relevant for inspiration is that it now supports playing two different streams of audio: one for announcements and another for music, and their new mixer speaker component lets you combine the two streams, (their new mixer component even supports audio ducking, so it can lower the volume of the music while your announcement plays) when using their Voice Assistant functionality.

My point here is not to suggest using code from ESPHome but instead to just separate your "music player" from your "announcement player" and use a mixer to combine the output. That way the code can be totally differance, which I think makes sense since most users would likely want very high-quality audio for music playback if they can get it but probably do not care as much about audio quality for announcements.

[JarbasAl]

in OVOS we already make the distinction, media and "sounds" are completely independent