Music Assistant has just released its biggest update yet. It comes with a visual overhaul, a host of new features and the introduction of a custom media streaming protocol. If you use Home Assistant and rely on this awesome audio manager, you’ll love version 2.7.
The team launched a major UI and UX refresh, making the app as premium as the audio it handles. The first thing you’ll probably notice is the foldable navigation bar on the left side of the screen, which feels much more intuitive, especially if you’re new to the platform. Navigating the settings page is also much easier now, thanks to the addition of breadcrumbs.
The biggest quality of life improvement here is the new built-in player, which lets you listen to music directly in the browser you’re using. This is a great feature for previewing a song to make sure it’s appropriate before playing it to all the speakers in the house.
Much of the new functionality is made possible by the introduction of user profiles and logins. I would say that logging in every now and then can be annoying, but the team tried to make it as simple as possible, even allowing users to use their existing Home Assistant login as a single sign-on. The main benefit here is organization, as you can now have different user profiles with their own music providers, meaning you won’t have four separate Tidal accounts messing up your Playlists tab.
Better yet, this allows users to designate who has access to each speaker, which is perfect for preventing kids from commandeering your desk speaker during an important video call.
This new connection interface also unlocks remote music streaming. So, you can now access Music Assistant anywhere you can connect to the Internet. The team created a new web application that handles remote connections using Home Assistant Cloud’s built-in media streaming capabilities, known as WebRTC, to route audio from your Music Assistant server to your current location.
You don’t need a Home Assistant Cloud subscription to use this feature, which is great. However, Cloud subscribers will have access to more powerful routing, which should improve streaming stability in certain locations. The connection is peer-to-peer and end-to-end encrypted, so you can rest assured that your listening habits remain private.
The team also introduced Sendspin, a brand new media streaming and synchronization protocol. This is completely open source and free to use. Music Assistant created this protocol because existing solutions didn’t quite meet the needs of a whole home audio system.
Sendspin is designed to stream high-fidelity audio, album art, and visualizers, automatically adapting the stream to what each device can handle. For now, this is mostly a technical preview, but you can try it out in your browser or on Google Cast-enabled speakers using the experimental capability built into the update.
The team recently added support for external audio sources such as Spotify Connect. This allows you to stream from the Spotify app to your Music Assistant server, then send that audio to all your speakers, even if they don’t support Connect natively. Additionally, the platform now supports AirPlay 2 speakers as a player provider. Just be aware that not all AirPlay 2 devices are created equal, so you should definitely check the documentation for limitations before setting them up.
The update contains even more small features; There are now DSP presets that allow you to quickly record and apply custom audio configurations to your playback devices. There is also support for scrobbling, with compatibility for LastFM, ListenBrainz and Subsonic.
Music Assistant is also expanding its hardware reach with new player providers, including Yamaha MusicCast and Roku devices running Media Assistant. You also get a host of new radio and podcast providers, such as BBC Sounds and Podcast Index. Niche providers like Phish.in and Nugs.net have also been added, alongside Internet Archive and Japanese platform Niconico.
Source: Home Assistant
