Expose Music Assistant internal routing (sources) as a Home Assistant Action

[The-Silent-Fire]

Description:
I am requesting a way to trigger Music Assistant’s internal "Source" routing—specifically for Plugin Providers like the VBAN Receiver—via Home Assistant automations.
The Problem:
Currently, there is a functional gap between the Music Assistant (MA) UI and Home Assistant (HA) actions. In the MA UI, I can manually switch a player (like a Sendspin/Squeezelite instance) to a VBAN stream. However, this cannot be automated in HA.
As clarified by developers, media_player.select_source in HA is designed for hardware-native inputs (HDMI, Line-in). Because many MA players are software-based, they report that they don’t support select_source, causing automations to fail even though the MA UI shows a "Source" picker for internal routing.
Proposed Solution:
Instead of trying to force this into the standard media_player.select_source (which creates ambiguity between hardware and software sources), I propose:

A Dedicated MA Action: Create a specific Home Assistant action (e.g., music_assistant.select_routing_source) that allows us to programmatically switch a player to an MA-level source like VBAN, AirCast, or the MA Queue.
play_media Support: Ensure that MA-specific URIs (e.g., mass://vban_receiver/...) are recognized as valid media content IDs within the media_player.play_media service.
Default Boot Source: Provide an option in the Player Settings to define a "Default Source" so that players can automatically initialize to a specific Plugin Provider (like VBAN) upon startup.

Why this matters:
This would allow for seamless multi-room audio workflows—for example, automatically routing a PC's audio (via VBAN) to specific Sendspin players when a "Media Mode" scene is activated, without requiring manual intervention in the MA interface.
Context:

Music Assistant Version: 2.8.5
Player Type: Sendspin / Squeezelite
Note: While VBAN is in Alpha, the routing logic is already functional in the UI; this request is simply to expose that existing functionality to the Home Assistant service layer.

Thank you so much for everyone working on this project!

[The-Silent-Fire]

I Just wanted to add some context to this request. I discussed this with Traveling_Gav on Discord, and he pointed out that the reason media_player.select_source doesn't work for software players (like Sendspin) is because HA expects that action to switch physical inputs (like HDMI or Line-in).Since Music Assistant is doing the 'routing' internally (e.g., sending a VBAN stream to the player), we likely need a dedicated Music Assistant action to trigger that routing from an automation.

My Use Case is that I wanted a way to pipe audio from my phone or tablet into my whole-home audio system powered by Sendspin. I have a Bluetooth receiver going into a Pi running VBAN; the latency is incredible (half a millisecond), so it’s perfect for live playback. However, I have to manually set the player source to the VBAN plugin in the Music Assistant UI every time. I want to be able to automate this switching through Home Assistant so I can dynamically send my phone's audio to different speakers or zones (like a voice command or a button press in the kitchen) without having to open the MA web UI. A 'default source' wouldn't work because I need the flexibility to toggle this routing across various players in my house depending on where I am.

I know I could use an ffmpeg radio station as a workaround, but the 5-10 second latency makes it unusable for my needs. I’m not a dev, but Gav mentioned this would be a great way to bridge the functional gap for players that don't have native hardware inputs.

[OzGav]

Since Marcel has changed the way Audio Sources work you might now be able to just use play_media with the media_id as the VBAN name that you see in the Browse view. Give it a go!

[The-Silent-Fire]

Hi, sorry I was only just now able to test this. Thanks so much for the update. Unfortunately there are still some problems, although they are different than before. I'm not quite sure if it's my end or the new changes, but here's what happened.

I did a complete clean reinstall of Music Assistant (stable release) and completely wiped all application data to isolate this.

The VBAN/Ariacast plugins no longer appear under the traditional "Select Source" player dropdown menus. Testing the stream via a Home Assistant automation (media_player.play_media with mass://vban_receiver/pi-BT-Receiver) executes without error and successfully pauses the active Music Assistant queue, but fails to switch the source or play audio. However, I can now locate the pi-BT-Receiver stream inside the Browse folder. When clicked, the UI claims it is playing on the target speaker (tested on both Sendspin speakers and a standard Chrome browser player), but the stream is entirely silent.

Hardware/Network Verification: To rule out a local infrastructure issue, I verified the transmitter layer directly on the host Raspberry Pi. A live arecord meter test on the Pi confirms the incoming optical capture signal from the source phone is actively bouncing up to 36%. The background vban.service is confirmed running cleanly with matching compliant parameters: -r 44100 -f 16L. Because the stream populates under Browse and successfully triggers player state changes (pausing), I believe the network path is fully open. The raw audio frames appear to be dropping entirely within the new internal media routing core.

I'm not sure if I did something wrong, if it's a new bug, etc. I appreciate your and everyone's time.

[OzGav]

@sprocket-9 are there any issues from your end with VBAN?

[sprocket-9]

Working fine for me on 2.9.1 with squeezelite and chrome sendspin players.

Because the stream populates under Browse and successfully triggers player state changes (pausing), I believe the network path is fully open

Not necessarily, it just means the VBAN plugin is running and MA ready to receive and process the PCM stream.

Possibilities:

1. network issue stopping stream reception
2. plugin ignoring stream packets if the sender IP and stream name don't match configuration
3. send and receive audio format stream parameters mismatch - usually you'll hear something though even if it sounds odd
4. Insufficient processing power preventing MA keeping up with the received stream rate

As it was working for you previously and an upgrade to the latest version caused it, likely not 1-3 if nothing at the sending end changed.

Is MA also running on a pi? Processing the VBAN stream does take a fair bit of processing and with 2.8 a pi4 can keep up OK at the lower VBAN rates, as long as full MA debug logging (cpu heavy) wasn't in use. With 2.9 reported to be generally heavier on resources when all the nice new audio analysis features etc are in use, there may not be enough headroom on the core the plugin is running on to process the VBAN stream at the required rate, if it's busy with other background tasks.

Things to try:

• Turn off new features and try again.
• Check CPU use when stream in use.
• Turn on VBAN plugin debug logging and enable "log stream stats" under advanced settings. If you're getting any kind of processed packets at all, that rules out 1. and 2. Lower processed vs target rate numbers indicate 3. or 4.

[The-Silent-Fire]

Hi, thanks for the help and sorry for my delayed response. For #4 I have home assistant running on a proxmox vm with 4 cores of a 3900x, and music assistant through home assistant.

After tracking things down for a bit it turns out I had a network ip set slightly wrong after changing it and vban now does work in music assistant again!

However using the play media home assistant still doesn't seem to work. While playing something else, selecting it as an entity pauses the playback rather than switching, and selecting it as a device does nothing. Here's my yaml if it helps:

action: media_player.play_media
target:
  entity_id: media_player.home_assistant_voice_093e94_media_player
data:
  media:
    media_content_id: mass://vban_receiver/pi-BT-Receiver
    media_content_type: music
    metadata:
      navigateIds:
        - {}
        - media_content_type: ""
          media_content_id: __MANUAL_ENTRY__
      browse_entity_id: media_player.home_assistant_voice_093e94_media_player

I really appreciate all of your work.

[OzGav]

Where did you get that media_content_id from? That isn't a valid URI. Have you tried just the name pi-BT-Receiver

[The-Silent-Fire]

I'll be honest, I've been using google's ai for some of the more technical coding based stuff since I don't really know code and I'm more of a hardware person. I know it's controversial but it's helped me get a lot farther than I would on my own. Although obviously it can make mistakes, sorry about that. It was about a week ago so I don't remember if it said why to use that.

I just tested both vban_receiver/pi-BT-Receiver and pi-BT-Receiver and I'm afraid they didn't change it. They also didn't pause the currently playing stuff.

[OzGav]

Yeah OK I have checked and this won't work right now. We are looking for a solution.

[The-Silent-Fire]

Ok thanks. I'm sure I'm ignorant but it feels closer this time.