You will like 2.5 even more 
Hahahaha Cyril, you seem to know me!! OMG this is crazy! Thank you so much!!
Exactly what I was looking for!! Just perfect!!
Cheers
Eric
I liked it myself as well haha. Good idea, thank you!
Hi Cyril @Cyril_Hendriks
Awesome app, greatly appreciated, and much respect.
With the speaker Then cards you have almost all types on Play, except Genre…
You can play an Album, Artist, Playlist, Podcast, Station, or a specific track… but not a Genre. Would it be possible to add this please?
I often just listen to a genre on random. But Music Assistant seems to have this oddity that it will only play about 60-70 tracks on random from that genre… when I have thousands. So I would like to create a flow that when the music stops I can just play more from the same genre. (My Yamaha MusicCast speakers and HiFi streamer playing FLAC files from an SMB share on my NAS doesn’t support the Don’t Stop The Music feature, so I want to bodge my own together.)
I’m running version 2.5.0 on a Homey Pro 2026 with the latest version 13.5.1 firmware.
Thank you for your consideration.
Thanks for the kind words, and good catch! I’ve added a “Play genre” card in version 2.6.0. It’s available in test now: Music Assistant | Homey
You pick a genre from your Music Assistant library and the card plays every track of that genre, in random order. The ~60-70 tracks you noticed is how Music Assistant’s own play button for a genre works: it takes a sample of at most about 75 tracks (25 tracks plus a few from some albums and artists). The card asks Music Assistant for all the tracks of the genre instead. They are queued in batches, so the music starts right away even when the genre has thousands of tracks.
For your flow: use the trigger “The queue became empty” together with “Play genre” and it keeps going on your MusicCast speakers.
Two things to know:
- It needs Music Assistant 2.10 or newer.
- If a genre has no tracks of its own (only albums or artists, which is common with streaming providers), the card falls back to Music Assistant’s own selection. Your FLAC files with genre tags should be fine.
It’s still a bit new, so let me know how it goes with a big genre. If a very large genre gives trouble queueing, I’d like to hear about it.
Thank you very much good sir 
I shall give it a good testing over the weekend and let you know how I get on. Your work on this most excellent app is greatly appreciated… you are a legend 
Hi Cyril,
Unfortunately I haven’t been able to test the changes you made. I realised I was running an older version of the MA server in a Docker container on my NAS… but it wouldn’t let me just update that container, so I had to redeploy it… except I must have got one of the network settings wrong, and now I can’t connect to my NAS at all (my security settings were so locked down none of the usual methods to boot in to a safe config or reset the network settings would work… d’oh!) So it might take me a little while to get back up and running and test your changes. My bad, sorry!
Andy
Hi I installed Music assistant on my linux server and installed the app in Homey. Is there a way to simply display a play/pause button in Homey dashboard, along with information about what’s currently playing?
You can use one of the built-in widgets for that 
It’s called the speaker widget and they come in various sizes.
Hi Cyril, thanks, Okay, but I have 9 speakers connected, so does that mean I have to add each speaker separately to the dashboard?
It depends on how you want to control your speakers… if you want individual control, then yes. If you only want to control them as a group, create a group in your Music Assistant web interface, then add a speaker controller device in Homey connected to that MA group and add the widget to your dashboard for that group speaker.
I would take some screenshots to demonstrate, but I broken my NAS that my MA Docker container runs on, so until I manage to fix that I’m musicless 
The good news is that my NAS lives… IT’S ALIVE! 
The not so good news is that my Music Assistant server is toast… FUBAR… beyond saving 
So I am finally getting around to doing it properly… instead of some leach on my NAS resources of a Docker container (that was only originally meant to be a test and proof of concept) I am giving it it’s own hardware, and installing HA on a spare RPi5 with 8GB RAM and an NVMe SSD… and setting up MA as an HA add-on. It should rip when I’ve finished ha ha 
So I should be testing your changes soon good sir
EDIT: Yeehaa! I have music again 
It’ll probably take all night to finish all it’s scanning and database building… but it’s up and running and reconnected to my Homey… Happy Andy ha ha
I’m hoping the album art not updating will sort itself out once it’s not busy scanning files like mad…
New Music Assistant server fully setup (and we all know that’s a blatant lie, as smart home tech is never finished ) and has finished scanning my extensive music library for now.
I am still seeing some weirdness with album artwork in the Music Assistant device cards… but the Dashboard widgets seem to work just fine. And if you keep the device card open until the end of the song, when it changes it then does update to the new song playing.
Please don’t judge my music tastes… screenshots are just to demonstrate the odd behaviour (including time top left, as the forum seems to mess up the order of the images ha ha)
Hi Andy, thanks for your testing. What is the music provider that you are using?
Hi Cyril,
I’m using an SMB share hosted on my NAS (which is a bit of a beast, if I do say so myself) serving up all FLAC song files.
The odd thing is that if I open my Yamaha MusicCast mobile app to view the grouped speakers (which are all hardwired to my multi-gigabit LAN) that shows the correct album artwork as soon as the app loads. Same as the Dashboard widgets of the speakers in Homey for the Music Assistant app speakers.
It’s only the app’s device cards that show the last album artwork… which for those screenshots I took, one of them was artwork for a track last played a week ago, before I broken my NAS… like the app had it cached all that time and showed the correct track name and artist but didn’t fetch/receive the current artwork.
Hi Andy,
Good to hear the new server is up. Thanks for the screenshots, they helped.
I can reproduce it on my own iPhone, so it’s not your setup. The cover Homey serves is the right one: the web app and the dashboard widgets show it correctly. Only the device card in the iOS app keeps an older one. It looks like the iOS app holds on to its own copy of the image and only refreshes it when an update signal arrives while the card is open. That matches what you saw: the cover changes if you leave the card open until the next song, and you get last week’s cover if you open it later.
I tried everything an app can do about that: sending the update signal after each track, setting the image source again, serving the cover from a file or from a URL, and creating a new image for every track. The timestamp Homey keeps on an image never changes after an update, so the iOS app has nothing to notice. The new-image-per-track attempt was worse: no cover at all until the app was restarted.
So this is a Homey limitation, not something I can fix in the app. I’m reporting it to Athom with these details.
One thing that would help the report: if you swipe the Homey app away and open it again, is the card right at that moment?
Cheers,
Cyril
Hi Cyril,
Thanks for your reply and patience… appreciate you testing and replicating this issue. I’ve just had a little muck about with it…
So I started one of my favourite Alice in Chains songs going in your MA app on my iPhone… I let it play through with the Homey app in the background (because if it’s in the foreground during the track change the artwork updates okay) and sure enough after the song changed I re-opened the app and the artist & song title showed correctly but the artwork was still for the previous song. As requested I swiped the app to the background, then after a brief pause swiped back to it… and got the dreaded rotating “loading” icon, but the artwork didn’t update. I tapped away from the MA device card in the Homey app and opened the Yamaha MusicCast device card for the same player and it showed correctly. Tapping back to the MA app device card it still showed the prior song artwork. But when I tapped skip forward it briefly showed the correct artwork before then changing to the new skipped to song artwork and details. Pressing skip back then showed the correct details and artwork for The Sword track that followed the AiC song and previously didn’t update.
I hope you can follow all that, and that it makes sense… I tried to include the screenshots in order to help, and explain as best I can.
I do realise this is a bit of a minor issue, and that the inconsistencies are likely due to some weird confluence of interactions between iOS, Homey mobile app and your app… and is more than likely outside your control. But if this can be improved by the testing, cooperation, and collaboration between ourselves and Athom, that would be super awesome. Your assistance is appreciated.
EDIT: A little odd, and inconsistent with previous observations… I switched to Chrome to read some forum post replies, and when the song had change in the background again, out of morbid curiosity I swiped back to your MA app in Homey… but this time the album artwork and details were all correct for the new song playing. How bizarre…
EDIT EDITED: More oddness that I think proves without doubt it’s not your app, and would appear to be something caching/not updating cleanly in the Honey mobile app… when the song changed again while the app was in the background, I swiped back, your MA app showed the correct artwork and details, but then switching to the Yamaha MusicCast device card that then showed the current song title and artist, but a prior song’s artwork from several songs ago, the last time I had opened that device card 
EDITED EDIT EDITING: I had another dumb idea I thought I would check, and share (sorry, I would appear to be writing war and peace in this post… but hopefully all this testing and documenting helps)
So the random playlist progressed some more in the background… and both the MA device card and the MusicCast device card were then showing different prior song’s artwork… definitely not Duran Duran… but when I went to my Homey app Home screen and scrolled to the WidgetKeeper app media player that was previously selected to your MA app device I’m listening on, it was showing the correct artwork. How two different views of the same app’s device show different artwork, the mind boggles
Thank you for all the extensive testing. This is really useful :). I have opened an issue with Athom, because I don’t think it is a bug in my app: image.update() never advances Image.lastUpdated, so the iOS app shows a stale album cover on a device card · Issue #479 · athombv/homey-apps-sdk-issues · GitHub, and added your testing as well.
I will keep you updated!
Currently discussing in another forum thread about Aqara FP300 presence sensors showing detection on their device cards getting stuck and not updating… I am starting to possibly see patterns where there may not be… but I don’t believe in coincidences. I wonder if there is some core underlying update code within Homey that stops updating some entities… I’m not a software developer, hardware and networking is more my thing, but I have seen more than once, different devices/entities stop updating and it feels like a pattern forming to me…?
But thank you for the feedback and update, it is greatly appreciated. Thank you kindly good sir
Hi Cyril,
Have you had any luck with Athom on this issue? I agree with you that it doesn’t seem to be your app, but more some sort of refresh or caching issue within Homey or the Homey mobile app (or a bit of both).
It appears that the Aqara sensors not updating was a communication update issue, that the developer has now released an update for… after much testing and discussion with Athom. I hope they are as helpful with you on this issue 
Thank you kindly good sir
Andy
