Ditching Sonos for Music Assistant ★

How to set it up

1. Install Music Assistant

   I host my homelab things using docker compose and it was as simple as:

   services:
     music-assistant-server:
       image: ghcr.io/music-assistant/server:latest
       container_name: music-assistant-server
       restart: unless-stopped
       # Network mode must be set to host for MA to work correctly
       network_mode: host
       volumes:
         - ./music-assistant-server/data:/data/
       # privileged caps (and security-opt) needed to mount
       # smb folders within the container
       cap_add:
         - SYS_ADMIN
         - DAC_READ_SEARCH
       security_opt:
         - apparmor:unconfined
       environment:
         - LOG_LEVEL=info
   
     # And home assistant and other things.
   
   

2. Add providers

   A provider is a source of music. There’s a bunch of them but at the moment I only use a few:

   

   The Spotify provider for example should automatically sync all Spotify playlists into Music Assistant and allows you to search and play any song on Spotify.

3. Add players

   We need players to play our music, here’s what I currently use:

   

   The players should be automatically added as long as they have a matching provider enabled.

Open-source music management—particularly on Linux—has a reputation of being notoriously troublesome. But I’ve gotta say, Music Assistant was simple to setup and it works well (except issues with some players that I’ll get to shortly).

Sonos

It’s pretty funny, the Sonos speaker works better with Music Assistant than with the Sonos app. The radio completely stopped working via the Sonos app, while I can use Music Assistant to play the radio on the Sonos speaker.

The speaker might still disconnect or stop playback at odd times but it’s good enough to raise the mood in the washing room.

Squeezelite on Linux

I hate modern smart TVs with a passion so to stream we use a computer running Linux, connected to a dumb amplifier with some speakers. It works well but it makes it a bit more cumbersome to play music.

By installing Squeezelite the computer acts as a squeezebox client, effectively transforming it into a smart player for Music Assistant and Home Assistant to stream music to.

A HifiBerry player

As I had a Raspberry Pi lying around it made sense to try the HifiBerry AMP2 that transforms the Pi into a surprisingly capable amplifier and smart music controller. For simplicity I decided to start with their operating system HifiBerryOS that hopefully should “just work” and be open enough for me to manually fix things if needed.

While it works very well as a Spotify Connect device or to play over Bluetooth I had issues with it acting as a Squeezelite or Airplay client as the volume was super low when I tried to stream to it from Music Assistant.

It might be a software issue with HifiBerryOS but I haven’t had the energy to debug it or try other OS versions. Maybe I’ll revisit it when I want to outfit another room with speakers.

Arylic A50+

I was planning to use the HifiBerry to power two new speakers in the ceiling in the kitchen to replace the Sonos. But I got stressed out by the HifiBerry not working properly and the kitchen renovation was looming ever closer so I bought the Arylic A50+, hoping that it would work better with Music Assistant.

The device supports both Airplay and Squeezebox like the HifiBerry but again there were some issue with the volume being very low. I don’t know if both devices just happen to have similar bugs, if there’s a bug with Music Assistant, or if it’s some weird compatibility issue.

Sigh.

But there’s another way to make it work; the Arylic has an excellent Home Assistant integration and if you go that way then Music Assistant can use the Arylic as a player properly. You need the LinkPlay integration in Home Assistant and then enable the Home Assistant integration in Music Assistant.

(I tried the same with the HifiBerry integration but for some reason the HifiBerry media player exposed from Home Assistant didn’t show up in Music Assistant.)

In Home Assistant how do you…

• Play the P4 Norrbotten radio station?

  action: music_assistant.play_media
  target:
    entity_id: media_player.kitchen
  data:
    media_id: P4 Norrbotten
  

• Play the To Hell and Back track?

  action: music_assistant.play_media
  target:
    entity_id: media_player.kitchen
  data:
    media_id: To Hell and Back
    media_type: track
  

• Play the kpop playlist?

  action: music_assistant.play_media
  target:
    entity_id: media_player.kitchen
  data:
    media_id: kpop
    media_type: playlist
  

• Play the kpop playlist randomized?

  action: media_player.shuffle_set
  target:
    entity_id:
      - media_player.kitchen
  data:
    shuffle: true
  
  action: music_assistant.play_media
  target:
    entity_id: media_player.kitchen
  data:
    media_id: kpop
    media_type: playlist
    enqueue: replace
  

You get the new music_assistant.play_media action but otherwise you control the media players just as the other media player entities in Home Assistant.