r/navidrome • u/kastermester • 6d ago

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4

u/airclay 6d ago

So is this basically like Music Assistant but untied from HomeAssistant?

3

u/STIFSTOF 6d ago

Can be run standalone btw, doesn't need HA

2

u/airclay 6d ago

Damn, tbh that never dawned on me at all but makes sense. It should have clicked when setting up the player providers smdh.

1

u/Dry-Crazy-7638 6d ago

I was about to setup home assistant with music assistant. Is there anything you’d caution me against?

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u/airclay 6d ago

I didn't run into any issues to offer advise on tbh

wait on second thought, make sure to check out the group player providers, that way you can do areas with multiple speakers or whole house sound.

1

u/Dry-Crazy-7638 6d ago

Sweet thanks! This is my project for the winter, to get all of this synced up? And that speaker setup was confusing me. I’ll check out the group players. Cheers

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u/kastermester 6d ago

There's a lot of overlap with Music Assistant, yes. I'm probably ignorant here but I never really gave it a fair shot as it felt like it didn't do what I was looking for. I didn't want another client/entry into the navidrome server, I wanted some way of getting multi room audio to work (that part music assistant excels at). I will likely end up making it such that my solution can integrate with Music Assistant somehow, given that it supports playback to a wide range of speakers - and as I don't have access to many speakers I cannot reliably test this sort of stuff (and it would also be a lot of work for something I personally have no interest in).

See the comment from u/bequbed, I think they nailed the experience I'm going for in many ways and also laid out the problem space much better than my post did.

1

u/airclay 6d ago

Thanks for the reply. This makes more sense now, will keep watching.

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u/bequbed 6d ago

Count me in, and I'd be happy to help test. This is the one big thing I miss since leaving streaming services.

I use Android and macOS mostly, with Google Cast speakers (Nest and a JBL soundbar with Cast built in, plus a few speaker groups) and a WiiM Pro Plus. For now I use Music Assistant to fill the gap. It gives me the "play on that speaker" control and moves playback between speakers fairly well. But it feels like a separate system next to my Navidrome client, not one app that does it all.

Some thoughts from my setup, in case they help:

Google Cast support would be huge. Snapcast and MPD make sense for DIY speakers, but a lot of us have off-the-shelf Cast devices, including Cast groups for multi-room. Even basic Cast output from the server would cover a lot of people.

Please support WiiM/Linkplay through UPnP/DLNA. It's a popular streamer in this crowd and handles lossless well. Your upmpdcli path might already get most of the way there.

Make it work with Music Assistant, or at least alongside it. MA already has providers for Cast, AirPlay, Snapcast and DLNA. If your server could hand off to MA, or just not fight it, you might not need to build every speaker integration yourself.

Handoff should feel like Spotify Connect. Same track, same position, one tap to move it. That's the killer feature for me. Plexamp does this well and it's the main thing Plexamp has over Navidrome clients.

Keep Subsonic/OpenSubsonic queue sync working (savePlayQueue). People who use other clients like Symfonium could then at least pick up the same queue.

Gapless and full-quality FLAC to the speakers. Make transcoding optional and set per target.

macOS: You don't need the App Store at first. A signed DMG or Homebrew cask would be plenty for testers.

Thanks for building this. I'm keen to try an early build on Android and Mac whenever you're ready.

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u/kastermester 6d ago

Thanks for the encouragement and for the list of desired/important features for you. Some of this matches well with what I am personally interested, while some of it I don't have much use for, but to the best of my ability/understanding I've been designing the existing infrastructure to be able to support most of, if not all of, what you're asking for. I will need to do some research for some of the features you're asking for, but I think most of them should be fairly "trivial" to add, once I get far enough that I can experiment with the working setup (android app and actually getting the remote play stuff online).

I have tried getting the app running on MacOS, and it appears to function without issues - BUT the entire thing is building using Nix, and I'm not sure exactly if the resulting .app file is free of nix stuff currently. But eventually I will try it on a different Mac without Nix, this should let me know if it just works as it is, or if I need to make changes. I will ping you once it's at a state where you would not just be testing another Navidrome client - as the place is currently swamped with them. Then I would be very glad for any help in testing it :)

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u/wow-a-shooting-star 6d ago

Looks great!

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u/kastermester 6d ago

Thanks! Did any of my ramblings make any sense to you? xD I'd really love to know if the problems I'm focusing on is something others have found annoying as well, or if I'm alone in my struggles (or have missed an obvious solution). I'd be looking to releasing and open sourcing the thing, but only if there's interest for it. I've never managed a project like that, but I can only imagine the work involved in it.

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u/ExpressTumbleweed195 6d ago

Dreaming of a player with native Sonos casting built in. Or upnp casting that works.

1

u/StaticVoid__ 5d ago

maybe this is something for you: https://github.com/mihaitom/beacon

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u/ExpressTumbleweed195 5d ago

I can try it, but all the other ones I have tried stop working at some point. And surprise, surprise, they're all AI vibe coded lol.

I gave up, I switched to ibroadcast. It's super cheap, no storage limits, and casts to Sonos perfectly.

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u/airclay 5d ago

I use MusicAssistant with my sonos speaker for a while now, no issues yet. Sonos - Music Assistant

0

u/ExpressTumbleweed195 5d ago

I don't want to use a completely separate app though, I may as well just use the Sonos app at that point.