[APP][Pro & Server] Music Assistant

Apps
1

Music Assistant for Homey

Control your Music Assistant speakers from Homey: start music from flows, make announcements, and see what’s playing on your dashboard.

Music Assistant is an open-source music server that brings your streaming services, local library and radio together, and plays them on Sonos, AirPlay, Chromecast and many other speakers. It runs locally, for example as a Home Assistant add-on or in Docker.

What you get

Your speakers as Homey devices
Every Music Assistant player can be added as a device, with play/pause, next/previous, volume, shuffle and repeat, and the current title, artist, album and cover on the tile.

Flows

  • Play a track, album, artist, playlist, radio station or the latest episode of a podcast
  • Speak text on one or more speakers, optionally with a fixed volume and chime, or in a specific language
  • Play a sound from a URL as an announcement
  • Group and ungroup speakers, or move the music to another speaker
  • Clear the queue, add the current track to your favorites, turn “Don’t stop the music” on or off
  • Triggers when the title, artist or cover changes, or when the queue runs empty, and a condition on the number of items in the queue

Dashboard widgets

  • Search & Play: search your music and play it on any speaker. The Discover tab shows Music Assistant’s own Discover page, with the same rows in the same order. You change that page in Music Assistant itself, and you can pick per widget whose page it shows.
  • Party QR: guests scan a QR code and request songs from their own phone.

Requirements

  • Homey Pro (the app connects to Music Assistant on your local network)
  • Music Assistant 2.9 or 2.10; the Discover tab needs 2.10

The app finds your server automatically on most networks. If it doesn’t, enter the address and port (usually 8095) in the app settings. The connection test there shows whether everything works.

Authentication

The app needs a long-lived access token (bearer token) from Music Assistant. With it, the app can control your speakers and queues.

Create one in Music Assistant:

Settings → Users → User menu (⋯) → Access tokens → New token

Copy the token and paste it into the app settings in Homey. Treat it like a password: anyone with the token can control your Music Assistant.

The token belongs to the user who created it. The Discover tab shows that user’s Discover page unless you pick another user in the widget settings. Picking another user needs a token from an admin user.

Announcements

By default Homey renders the spoken text itself and sends it to Music Assistant as audio. If you have a text-to-speech engine set up in Music Assistant, you can let Music Assistant speak instead (setting in the app). Test that engine in Music Assistant first; if you only hear the chime, turn the setting off again.

Problems or ideas?

Post them in this topic. For a problem, please include:

  • the app version and your Music Assistant version
  • which speaker (type) it happens on
  • what you did and what happened
  • if possible, the Music Assistant log from around that moment

What changed in each version is in the changelog on the app page.

2

Remove the “& Cloud” part from your topic title, community apps are not supported on Homey Cloud.

3

Indeed, I meant server. Thanks for notifying.

4

Just found this and I think it might be the answer to all my prayers! In the UK it’s super hard to get BBC radio stations playing on HomePods without manually streaming from a device, which is not ideal from an automation perspective. Up to now I have been using OwnTone running on an RPi and then I was manually calling the API from flows. This is so much neater and more convenient and the artwork and metadata work right out of the box, plus integration with Apple Music, BBC Sounds and so many more. It’s just awesome. I got this set up and working in about 15 mins start to finish including a brand new Home Assistant install on a Mac, then Music Assistant on top and then installing and configuring the Homey app.

Just amazing work. Thank you.

Have donated!

5

Thank you very much for your donation! If you have any ideas on how to improve the app further, please let me know :slight_smile:

6

Thanks @Cyril_Hendriks

Just playing with this - do you have a good solution for having a doorbell chime interrupting playing music? Speak text does this natively really nicely and resumes play afterwards automatically. I can use a doorbell chime track for doorbell events but then how to get what was playing before to resume? I’ve managed this using advanced flow for Radio by checking whether the speaker is playing, checking if the track = name of my radio station and then if so, playing that station 4s after triggering the doorbell track. That works very well, but would be amazing to do the same when interrupting a music track and to be able to resume where it left off in the track. I can’t immediately see a way to achieve that.

7

Good idea! I will have a look into this :slight_smile:

8

I have created a new test version of the app with a new flow card type to play any sound (via a url) that works exactly the same as the speech announcements. It’s now in test and when I’m sure that nothing has been broken, I will push it to PRD :slight_smile:

9

Awesome! Thanks for super quick turn around. I will give this a test and let you know how I get on.

10

New card seems to work perfectly in my testing, thanks again.

One other little thing: I notice when streaming BBC Radio 4 (I’m using the Music Assistant BBC Sounds integration), I see that Music Assistant itself has metadata about the current programme (which in this case is a programme called “PM”, listed with its running times as “17:00 - 18:00 PM”) (see screenshot from Music Assistant below) but that doesn’t seem to come through to Homey (see 2nd screenshot below taken at the same time as the first). Are there any other items of metadata that could be fed through? I don’t see an ‘Album’ tag for example. Since the metadata items aren’t labelled in the Music Assistant UI it’s hard to know which are which, but I see there’s already an Artist tag in Homey and that’s blank while BBC Radio 4 is streaming so it doesn’t seem to be that.

Screenshot 2026-03-03 at 17.45.38
Screenshot 2026-03-03 at 17.45.38438×180 20.4 KB

Screenshot 2026-03-03 at 17.46.04
Screenshot 2026-03-03 at 17.46.04774×826 56.2 KB

Thanks again!

11

Getting the metadata right is still an ongoing struggle. May I ask you which service you use in Music Assistant to stream BBC Radio 4? I will check which metadata I can send to Homey.

12

Oww, that’s how you discover something
Great system!

The 3rd longlived token made it all happen :nerd_face:

13

Thank you - I’m using the BBC Sounds service in Music Assistant for this

Screenshot 2026-03-03 at 19.41.43
Screenshot 2026-03-03 at 19.41.431056×448 14.4 KB

14

By the way @Cyril_Hendriks I found something weird while testing which might shed some light on the metadata thing. I tried playing radio 4 on one speaker and then using the ‘add speaker’ card to play it on another. This worked and while the metadata on the first speaker looked exactly like the screenshot above, the metadata on the second had the programme artwork instead of the generic radio station artwork and also it showed the programme info! Like this:

IMG_3970
IMG_39701206×2622 238 KB

IMG_3971
IMG_39711206×2622 156 KB

15

Hi Jonathan, that you for your testing efforts. I will have a look into this next week the latest. I have some busy days upcoming.

16

Hi Peter, thank you! :slight_smile: Happy to see that you managed to connect MA with Homey. :slight_smile:

17

I think I managed to fix it in the latest test build: * Link: Music Assistant | Homey :slight_smile:

18

Looking good! Amazing work thanks @Cyril_Hendriks

IMG_3973
IMG_39731206×2622 286 KB

19

One more idea for you. Absolutely no rush, but it would be awesome to have some flow cards for controlling podcasts. I’m thinking:

  • play latest episode of
  • Play random episode of
  • Play all episodes of (Could then be put on shuffle mode if desired)

I’ve switched over to using this app now for 9 speakers for radio, music, doorbell and announcements full time so giving it a thorough soak test. Loving it, so many more use cases opened up with this. Where has this app been all my life?!

20

Nice ideas indeed. I’ll have a look at that :slight_smile: My first priority might be a bit more boring, but I want to make the app more efficient, since it’s consuming quite some memory :blush: