Music Assistant on Home Assistant on a Raspberry PI, how to add Player ?

[Leviani]

Hi Everyone, I recently went down the rabid hole of installing Music Assistant on my HA OS on a Raspberry PI 5.
It is nice to be able to pull it directly from the App catalog without any cloning or building.

However, since I do have a bunch of Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W flying around and even some Pi DAC Pro hat, I thought about building clients myself for each room in the house to finally get rid of the Amazon devices which are currently enabling my multi room audio streaming.

Since I am new to all this I spent at least a day trying to figure out if there is a Music Assistant Player I could just install on the PI Zero, but gave up on that.
The next best thing I found would be running Snapclient, and I did see in Music Assistant that it supports Snapclient as a Player Provider.
But it seems like I now also need to install a SnapServer somewhere ?
Home Assistant does currently not offer SnapServer as an application or Addon, and since HA OS does not allow easily to run containers in parallel to the actual OS, I am out of options.

Is there any way of making this work with only the PI 5 running HA and MA, and my multiple Zero 2 as clients at all ?

[OzGav]

Welcome! We have extensive documentation that will address all of your questions. Start here https://www.music-assistant.io/faq/stream-to/

edit; And I would recommend piccoreplayer rather than snapcast

[Leviani]

Sorry, I am a total newbee on any of those topics.
So this means, still running the HA with MA on the PI 5 and then installing piccoreplayer on the Zero ?
From that page it mentions that you do need to install a LMS to make this work ?
I also looked into that and it seems that the current Version of HA OS does not provide LMS anymore :(

[OzGav]

Did you use the Raspberry PI imager as you can setup your networking in that?

[Leviani]

I did, but when you download the img.gz file from the picoreplayer page this does not offer a config setting during setup (as my regular Pi OS or OS Lite does)

However doing a bit mroe research, I could not find the WiFi Driver packages for BCM43436 in 11.1 and now I just downloaded 8.2 which did mention the driver packages. And this I was at least able to start the config via the Web UI.
I guess I have to experiment a bit more to see how I can make this work.

But if I understand the basic picoreplayer image correct, this is just a light-weight OS with squeezelite running, and that should be enough for MA to discover the Client ?
If that is the case I might just go with Raspberry Pi OS Lite (32 bit) instead and just find out how to configure the squeezelite client ?
Or am I missing anything in that kind of setup ?

[OzGav]

It sounds like you arent using the imager which steps you through a bunch of questions and eventually asks you which OS you want and you can select picoreplayer then.

If you just use the imager you will find this is very easy.

[OzGav]

[Leviani]

Oh for frag sake ....thank you very much.
Like I posted above, I just went to https://docs.picoreplayer.org/downloads/, downloaded the Image and then used the Imager (Use Custom).
Now that you mentioned that again... I literally just discovered that there is a Media Player -> piCorePlayer setting as well, which natively supports the OS. :)

So I guess I should stop side-loading .img files :D
Thank you very much I will try that next.

[Leviani]

@OzGav even using the default piCorePlayer OS from the Imager does not allow to customize the WiFi Settings

If I compare this to any other System (both for the Zero 2 W)

It seems that you actually do have to download an older Version (in my case 8.2), then use the Imager to push it onto the SD Card, and then go through the effort of manually changing your wpa_supplicant.conf file to enable WiFi.

UPDATE:
I found a way to run 11.1, but I still had to change the wpa_supplicant.conf file on the SD Card to incorporate my WiFi settings, SSiD and Password.

[OzGav]

Glad you got it working. No idea why the customisation options stayed greyed out.