Play to GStreamer or Icecast2

[h3ndrik]

I would like to be able to stream the music to an Icecast2 internet radio server, which in turn forwards it to some hardware that can only play internet radio streams.

You already mention Icecast in the documentation in the section "I want to stream to Music Assistant" but that requires additional hardware and software. I would like some component that directly streams to an Icecast2 server.

A versatile way to implement this would be to leverage GStreamer. Which would be already integrated into Home Assistant via the respective integration. But I can't use that, since that integration doesn't work on Home Assistant Core and that hasn't been fixed in years.

We could define arbitrary gstreamer pipelines here (in Music Assisstant) and have it do various things, stream to Icecast, Snapcast, directly via TCP or whatever. I think that would be a good addition.

[OzGav]

An alternate solution has been identified here https://music-assistant.io/faq/stream-to/#web-radio

[h3ndrik]

I can't get this to work. First, there is a step missing in the instructions. You also have to add the MPD to Home Assistant via the device integrations. Only after that it's ready to be found within Music Assistant. I don't really understand the "httpd_output" option. And unless I install this as a HA add-on, everything breaks. I've installed a Mopidy for debugging, and I can see some internal IPs from Home Assistant being passed over the MPD protocol. But that also doesn't work since these IPs and ports aren't reachable from outside.

I'd very much prefer a more general solution, like how we were used to set up Snapcast or Mopidy. Just a way to write to some FIFO or GStreamer pipeline, and we'll be able to connect it with anything. No matter if it's the local sound card, an internet stream or some network protocol via FFmpeg.

This alternate solution is overly complicated, and at least for me it doesn't seem to work.