Fantastic you got it working!
As you say with the many years of thoughtful development, and the huge breadth of integrations - Home Assistant is really fantastic.
I first got involved in 2016, and it’s amazing how far it’s come!
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Hi @GregD, whilst I got going with roon early on with all kinds of extensions, I only switched end of last year to home assistant. I am impressed about the reliability, speed of the roon extension and roon home assistant player, should have switched much earlier! I use node-red for homekit and rules so the nice side effect is that I could install node-red in home assistant. Thanks for everything you & community is doing to enable roon for home assistant!
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Any ideas when Smart Playlists hitting the API?
No idea I’m afraid.
What is even more tantalising is that the amp in the HA Roon Player can see the smart playlists - but clicking them won’t play!
C’mon ROON can we please have access to these smart playlists via the API
Using tags and then smart dynamic granular playlists is so great (New, highly rated, Ambient Tech, not played this month) I really want to have one of these start when I get home from work
I doubt whether Roon Labs keep a close eye on the posts in the Tinkering category. I suggest you post this as a feature enhancement to the API in the Feedback > Feature Suggestions category. Roon Labs do read all posts there and in the Feedback category of the forum.
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What are you controlling in Roon via your HA dashboard? Looking at RoonLabs music player - it can only control volume?
I use:
- Play / pause
- Next track / previous track
- Volume
- Group / ungroup
- Transfer
- Play radio station
- Play playlist (not smart)
- I use play status to turn on / off DACs and amps based on whether a zone is playing
- Turn on / off ROCK overnight
There is a media browser, but I don’t use it because the roon app is much better
I must be missing something - I created a dashboard, and went to add entities, and could only find volume up control via Roon.
Most of the controls are on the media player itself.
Basic info here (some is this is’t relevant to Roon)
Additional Roon specific info here:
And the media player ui card here:
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Sorry to be annoying, could you explain the logic - if I’m not controlling Roon, what am I controlling or using of Roon?
I’m not sure what you mean.
Of course you’re controlling Roon. The links @GregD provided are the answers you’re looking for. If you want a Roon zone to show up as a card on a dashboard, you add a Media Control Card to your dashboard and configure it to represent the Roon zone you want to control.
Here’s a quick example of what that looks like on a dashboard with two media control cards each controlling a different Roon zone.
Is this what you’re trying to do?
As @gTunes says the key question is “what are you trying to do”.
The HA integration is perhaps unlike most other Roon extensions, in that almost all of the logic and setup is done inside Home Assistant, not inside the Roon apps.
The sole exception is the volume callback logic - which a few of us need, but is not used by the majority of HA/Roon integration users.
Basically HA sits along side Roon. HA gets status updates from all the Roon zones, so that HA can take action (turn on power etc) based on what happens in Roon.
However most of those actions affect other devices connected to HA (eg a power switch connected to HA can turn on when a Roon zone starts playing).
Similarly HA can tell Roon to do things. So a remote control integrated into HA can tell Roon to play something, or change volume etc.
So the key is that you probably need other devices integrated into HA to get the full benefit.
There are exceptions - I have a special zone on Roon called All, when it starts playing HA groups it with other zones so they all play together. Kind of an ‘auto group’ but most of what I do used IKEA rotes, Zwave power switches etc.
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I’ve done something similar that’s evolved over time visually. It’s busy but that’s mostly due to the fact that I have a lot of zones. Some of the media player cards are conditional and show different players in certain conditions (e.g. if I’m playing to an endpoint using airplay instead of roon) and then several amplifiers have multiple inputs so the background colour of a powered on amplifier matches the colour of the respective player.
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Like Greg says, grouping works well in HA. For my setup the little toggle icons will group a zone with the primary (currently Living but can be changed with a long-press).
The volume up buttons use a script logic to get current volume and increase/decrease by a fixed value (fixed per player but generally between 3-5) and the volume “sizes” jump to a specific default.
I always use roon to start music… but after that I use Home Assistant almost exclusively to control volume and add/remove zone groups. I have a mix of equipment and roon can’t control volume for all of them… in some cases I use the HA integration to go back the other way and use the volume up button in Roon to call my volume up script on the relevant amplifier.
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Quick question: does the integration/ media player expose a mute_toggle command? I am using the integration in combination with an Unfolded Circle remote control and it seems to expose dedicated mute and unmute commands but I cannot find a mute toggle command which would be helpful.
Many thanks.
Yes, but if I remember correctly it’s exposed as an attribute that you need to query/set… or at least there was some reason it was better to use a script. I use the below script for mine (not just denon players, that was just what I set up first).
alias: Media Mute Toggle
fields:
media_player:
description: Denon media player target device
example: media_player.denon_avc_x4800h
sequence:
- target:
entity_id: "{{ media_player }}"
data:
is_volume_muted: "{{ not state_attr(media_player , 'is_volume_muted') }}"
action: media_player.volume_mute
mode: single
icon: mdi:volume-mute
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Thanks, that is helpful. Will have a look at it.
Sorry for my slow reply - but @James_Fitzell has it covered - you need to write a little logic to implement the toggle.
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Or just map it to play/pause. Mute makes sense when you’re trying to let something like a TV commercial play without hearing the audio. It may make less sense for music.