Why does Music Assistant set players to Idle when pausing instead of Paused

[eveiscoull]

The title is fairly self-explanatory, I think. This has been my only gripe with Music Assistant.

I've got a card that shows a media player when it's playing or paused, and is hidden when set to any other state. I don't want it showing when it's idle, since it's not doing anything. When it's paused, there's an expectation that you'll press Play at some point. Idle is for when the device isn't being actively used, and will have new media played instead of the previously selected one.

I've been diving through the PRs on music-assistant/server and issues on music-assistant/support and can't find anything apart from #3467 regarding pausing/paying from a voice assistant which fails due to the state being Idle, but it was closed as a non-MA issue.

Other media players (such as directly playing to the Voice PE) works with pause/play, setting the state to Paused correctly, but any players through Music Assistant set them to Idle.

[OzGav]

Possibly the device doesn't support pause. MA won't try and trick you and say the device is paused if it is actually stopped

[eveiscoull]

Sure, so I have 4 groups, 1 for each room. The only members of these groups are the players from those rooms (the reason I only have 1 per group is just so I can futureproof myself for adding more speakers to each room, so I just have to add them to the group and be done with it, instead of having to create them at the time and reconfigure my cards/automations)

In terms of supported features, they definitely all support Pause, since they're all odd numbers (1 = Pause):

• Kitchen speaker: supported_features: 152461
• Main bedroom Chromecast: supported_features: 153529
• Living room TV: supported_features: 152461
• Office Home Assistant Voice Media Player: supported_features: 1200653

All the groups use the default settings for Universal groups.

[OzGav]

We'll get back to you

[jay-kub]

I am experiencing the same issue--pausing my MA media_player (via service call or GUI) results in the state immediately changing to idle.

I have a switch on my desk that I use to toggle between playing/pausing the music (excluding idle), and I was able to work around the issue by using the Sonos integration's media_player in my automation. Unfortunately, the workaround will fail if the media_player is paused using the MA GUI.

Is it possible to change this from a discussion to an issue?

[OzGav]

The situation is that universal groups do not support pause so stop is used under the hood. You can simply call play again and the group will resume. We could potentially implement pause support if all players support it, however, given the limited dev resources we have, we don’t feel it’s worth the effort as it’s just a small detail

[jay-kub]

My issue may be different in that regard--all my speakers are Sonos.

[OzGav]

Currently MA does not use pause for Sonos either, so this is expected behaviour.

[OzGav]

We are interested in why it matters whether the state is paused or idle in HA. If there is a strong use case then we can look into whether the fix lies with HA or MA

[jay-kub]

My thought process is I only want to toggle between pausing/playing music that I'm actively listening to, but if nothing is playing I don't want to restart a completed queue or replay a sound file (notification) from long ago.

Honestly, it could just be my lack of understanding of what the idle state represents. Originally, I just wanted to exclude a "stopped" state, but while troubleshooting this I realized that's not actually one of the state options. I'm assuming idle ~ stopped but haven't tested enough to confirm.