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Any way to send Google Play Music content?

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    Any way to send Google Play Music content?

    Would be great to be able to trigger playing of music - artist / album / radio-station / whatever - from the plugin. Any chance of adding this?

    #2
    Did you ever figure this out? I want to announce the start of our vacation (holiday) with a playlist. I have the URL and music uploaded is supposed to be MP3 but apparently it isn't working. I have the MIME Type set to audio/mp3
    Karl S
    HS4Pro on Windows 10
    1070 Devices
    56 Z-Wave Nodes
    104 Events
    HSTouch Clients: 3 Android, 1 iOS
    Google Home: 3 Mini units, 1 Pair Audios, 2 Displays

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      #3
      I use some HS scripts to cast a local (on the local network) MP3 playlist to my speaker groups by way of VLC media player. If you require playing music on the cloud, I've read about a few convoluted ways to programmatically send commands to your speakers, but I haven't tried any of them. I also read it may not work with some connected services.

      https://forums.homeseer.com/forum/ho...03#post1358503

      https://forums.homeseer.com/forum/ho...96#post1409296
      HS4, Insteon, Z-wave, USB-UIRT, Harmony Hubs, Google Hub/Chromecasts/Speakers, Foscam & Amcrest cameras, EZVIZ DB1 doorbell
      Plugins: BLLAN, BLOccupied, BLUSBUIRT, Chromecast, Harmony Hub, Insteon, Jon00 Homeseer/Echo Skill Helper, Harmony Hub, Jon00 DB Charting, MediaController, NetCAM, PHLocation2, Pushover 3P, weatherXML, Z-wave

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        #4
        Pretty sure the "functional" side of interacting with Google Chromecast / Home devices has declined - at least for 3rd party stuff like HS or others. They want everything on a Google device and/or controlled by the Google device. We still use the Chromecast Audio units (now discontinued) for music; but all control is through an Android Google Play Music interface. 🤷‍♀️

        On the plus side, since Google is about to force us to use Youtube Music - which really sucks compared to Play Music app - we'll finally switch everything over to Spotify and give them our "family account" money and this problem will be gone.

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          #5
          I don't want to give any of the services money. I already blasted the whole YouTube music thing. The primary time I listen to Google Play music is when I am mowing the lawn. I I can get another AP or two and broadcast via the squeezebox/LMS setup. Or try Amazon since we have prime?

          I ended up setting up a squeezbox playlist and playing it. I just wanted to play some vacation announcement songs at quitting time when m wife got off. It meant downloading music and repairing the LMS but it was something I had been wanting to do since the hard drive failed, so this ended up being a needed kick start.
          Karl S
          HS4Pro on Windows 10
          1070 Devices
          56 Z-Wave Nodes
          104 Events
          HSTouch Clients: 3 Android, 1 iOS
          Google Home: 3 Mini units, 1 Pair Audios, 2 Displays

          Comment


            #6
            I hear you. I have had a Squeezebox player and/or server on/off for about 20 years now, IIRC - that was the first driver to rip all my CDs BITD. I finally gave up on keeping it up and going after so many years. Now using Volumio RPIs with a good DAC to play local FLAC music. It's pretty solid and uses any DLNA library or direct file references. I'm currently using it as a player target for J River Media Center audio - which is a really cool combo of UI and quality audio output.

            But there's a few of us in the house... and plenty that don't want to listen to my library of music, but their own. 🙄😉

            I wish there were a better solution than giving them monthly money; but since my 20-somethings will just pay the monthly themselves if we don't have a family account... Spotify is a decent music option that I can support house-wide and in the cars. I tried using the Amazon Music option (as you mention, already "included" with Prime) but it is clear that is not really the case: the "included" version is a limited library and they want $10 a month for the full library. 😒

            Meanwhile, I'm adding a NAS to the Sprinter so we have MY full music and movie library when out on the road. 😋

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              #7
              Originally posted by gregoryx View Post
              Pretty sure the "functional" side of interacting with Google Chromecast / Home devices has declined - at least for 3rd party stuff like HS or others. They want everything on a Google device and/or controlled by the Google device. We still use the Chromecast Audio units (now discontinued) for music; but all control is through an Android Google Play Music interface. 🤷‍♀️

              On the plus side, since Google is about to force us to use Youtube Music - which really sucks compared to Play Music app - we'll finally switch everything over to Spotify and give them our "family account" money and this problem will be gone.
              How will the problem be gone? I assume you will still be using your chromecast audio devices. How do you integrate Spotify? I am asking because all our audio zones are connected to a chromecast audio devices and we also use Spotify. Right now we are using our phones to send the music to the chromecast audio devices.

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                #8
                Plenty of options at that point (though each has a different issue with HS integration):
                1. Raspotify seems to use something called "Spotify Connect" that does just this. (https://github.com/dtcooper/raspotify)
                2. Volumio has a Spotify plugin that works with any Premium account.
                3. Mopidy Spotify plugin (same as Volumio really).

                There might be other options. I'm guessing / hoping that the first one works as well as Pianobar / Patiobar has been working with Pandora for a decade now - which is awesome.

                Edit: forgot to mention that our audio is through Russound; so Chromecast, RPI, etc are just audio inputs. Not sure if that changes the picture?

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                  #9
                  gregoryx Can you explain your setup? I am not quite sure where Volumio or Raspotify come into play. In my case I have a bunch of Chromecast Audio devices that feed into a 16 channel Russound amp. Then I cast Spotify to the Chromecast devices to get music to the different zones. Right now I am doing the music selection and casting from mobile devices but I would like to do this through HS and HSTouch and Alexa.

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                    #10
                    You have read in the latest Google Play app update from the App Store that Google Play is going away and being replaced by YouTube Play?

                    Comment


                      #11
                      George , that was an additional motivator. I don't like what I've seen so far with YouTube Play. I really just want music - and I often prefer albums. Play Music was pretty good at at that. But YouTube Music seems to be a bit more track-oriented. And I really don't want any push toward video, which I assume YT-Music will be doing (Play Music does a little of it already). But the biggest motivator is getting something that is integrated into HS - not just a separate app on the tablets and phones.


                      mulu , it sounds like we're looking for similar functions.

                      BITD, when my music was from a stack of 4 Sony ES 400-CD changers controlled by a Slink-E, everything integrated into HS beautifully (HS 1.x - 1998 or something like that). It was really my primary use for HS at the time. X-10 and voice control were so-so; but that changer control stuff was excellent. There was no HS-Touch at the time, of course, so the UI was a web interface with everything populated by HS to display artist, album, song, album-art, genre, etc. And touching anything in the web interface would give options (through HS) to do something else - such as play the album or the artist or the genre or up-vote / rate the song, etc.

                      Everything was controlled through HS and managed inside HS. Then I re-did it with HS Touch (with HS2.x) and then moved it all to a MainLobby front-end with HS2 back-end. Then moved it to MainLobby back-end. Somewhere in that time-frame, the CD changers got dumped / ripped but all the cool functionality was there using J River integrated with ML.

                      Now I'm back on HS3/HST, the CDs are long-gone and everything is either FLAC on the storage servers or "online" stuff; and Play Music was the online music choice. But it has NEVER worked worth a darn with HS. The Chromecast plugin looks exciting; but there's almost no control - just stop/start/play/next/prev; can't play an artist or album or playlist. And little to no way to do anything useful with the data - just cover-art, basically. Control is the Android app. Web control isn't quite as good as the Android apps but I really like the web interface as well; but it doesn't scale well enough to easily integrate into HSTouch.

                      There are projects that integrate with Play Music in a mopidy plugin; but they're painfully unreliable. And there's no YT-Music control that I know of. So... there's no fixing that with Play Music or YT Music.

                      The Chromecast units can still be used to cast Spotify, but Spotify can be controlled from a couple different methods in HS. Even the old SqueezeBox setup will play Spotify playlists; so I could resurrect that if necessary.

                      Spotify also has an API and it has been used to set up 3rd-party control and output direction. The projects I mentioned above are oriented around the Spotify API and a GitHub project, librespot (https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot), which is the base for all the projects I've found. The goal as I try out the various projects is to see which one integrates best into HS. My guess is it's going to be HTTP put/get - which isn't great, but it's pretty good. Worst-case, I can use a web-based client inside of HS-Touch to control Spotify (and direct it to any player points, including Chromecast devices).

                      That's what I've been doing with Pandora for years now: the pianobar and patiobar projects make a small web interface that shows well in an HST client and allows full control without any real HS integration. Same for Volumio. So neither of those are "integrated" (no variables passing or calls from HS to them); but they both appear in a window inside the HST tablets around the house and give full control of Pandora and FLAC content. The goal is - at the very least - to have that functionality with Spotify (since I've been unable to get that to work well with Play Music).

                      I should probably update my photos of my HS-Touch screens... a picture might be better than these thousand words.

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