homeassistant

It is a handy tool.

The coolest feature is the Spotify Connect which turns your MA speaker into a Spotify Connect satellite to play to directly from the app. (I know, Spotify is terrible, but it is an admittedly Connect is a very very good feature in both Spotify and MA). Sadly, it is very buggy when testing. For me it worked well for a while, but now it bungles Spotify encoding and plays very very slow and distorted

It plays my home library very well through my ESP32S3 DAC to my old 90s Yamaha AV receiver and amp. (Side effect of also being able to control the sound system via HomeAssistant and IR and use voice assistant on a MEMS mic.

Like others have said, the interface is very clunky and bad for browsing your library of local music, but oh well. I also wish it had a radio function for your local music.

I started looking into it for radio - unifying paid SiriusXM, free TuneIn, and free Shoutcast/Icecast powered radio stations, in a single system.

My idea was to show a list of our favourite radio stations on a dashboard tablet, with buttons to play them on particular media players (Google speakers, etc)

I set it up and started making a Home Assistant dashboard that shows the list. It took a while to figure out how to properly display the list of all the stations, but I ended up figuring it out using the flex table card component: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/dynamic-buttons-based-on-template-sensor/917207

I didn't end up finishing the project though, and put it on hold while working on other things. I'll revisit it one day.

It can also pull from Plex, but I haven't tried that. At the moment, I usually cast from Plexamp to my speakers when I want to play something.

I just use it as a unified fronted to play music on my office speakers. I have Jellyfin, Tidal and Bandcamp connected as providers.

In my experience the "play on this device" option isn't very reliable, so I'd recommend keeping a separate Jellyfin if you need music on the go with your phone.

I use it and find it really good. I have it running in a Docker container on my media server rather than a HomeAssistant add-on.

The interface is a bit clunky, but that's my only real complaint. There are some third party apps available that ease the pain of this a bit - I use Ensemble on Android.

The main strength is the ease with which you can add multiple different sources and have them work side by side. I do get some duplication, but that's usually because the Spotify version of an album is the deluxe or something along those lines.

HomeAssistant integration is great. You can easily automate playing tracks/albums/playlists - I have a wireless button under the kitchen table that triggers my choice of playlist on a double press and my wife's on a single press.

Sendspin is fantastic - it's practically effortless to have multiple players with different protocols playing in sync. Really looking forward to this protocol developing more, since the unfinished version is so good!

Lacking in intuitive interface and pretty buggy at times, I suspect most that use it enjoy the flexibility it introduces to work with multiple data sources, multiple playback devices, and DSP features to normalize audio.

They accomplish different things. Anyway, in my experience music assistant is still a bit underbaked. But I'd love to hear what other people have to say!

For me the win is being able to delete my Google speakers for voice control. Paired with Home Assistant Voice device it can pretty much replace Google. I'll just use the Google speakers via bluetooth as music players.

UI is a bit clunky as mentioned, but I'm happy to live with that for now due to ^^^.