Plexamp Headless

[remon1496]

While I really enjoy using Music Assistant—and now that we have Spotify Connect—it’s still a bit of a shame that Plexamp Headless is not available yet as a plugin provider. The UI of Music Assistant is definitely improving, but to be fair, nothing currently comes close to the Plexamp mobile experience. It would be amazing if Music Assistant players could function as headless Plexamp receivers.

Sure, we can stream our Plex library through Music Assistant, but it’s just not the same as casting directly from the Plexamp app. The mobile experience is truly exceptional.

I’d be very grateful if Plexamp Headless could be implemented as a plugin provider, allowing all players to act as headless receivers for Plexamp, just as with Spotify Connect. I don’t have the technical knowledge to say how feasible that is—it sounds simple in theory, but I imagine there are many technical details I might be overlooking that could make implementation more complex.

Keep up the great work!

[wjbeckett]

This isn't really possible.
The Plexamp receiver code is proprietary.
For this to work, you'd need to be able to run Plexamp headless inside Music Assistant. It's not really indented for this purpose.
Just like how you can't use Music Assistant to turn your Google speaker that is added to Music Assistant into a Sonos speaker to play to it via the Sonos app.

If you want to use Plexamp to play to Plexamp headless speakers, then you don't need Music Assistant.

I am working on an player provider to have Music Assistant be able to play TO Plexamp headless devices. This will be released soon. But this won't enable Plexamp app --> Music Assistant Speaker. It is Music Assistant --> Plexamp headless.

[remon1496]

Thanks for explaining why it’s not possible. Great to see you’re working on such a valuable feature.

[OzGav]

Current information is that even this is not possible as Plexamp headless devices only support Plex as a source

https://discord.com/channels/753947050995089438/1377149388652285962/1379300220721958972

[wjbeckett]

Yep. That's me on discord.
I can still do it, it'll just be interfacing with the underlying stack, not Plexamp itself.

[ovizii]

This isn't really possible.

I disagree with this statement. Its easily possible and I was using what I am describing below before I signed up for Spotify. The solution wasn't perfect and nobody seemed interested in perfecting it but here is how it could work.

I had an RPI connected to a USB DAC so all I needed was to get my music to the RPI without installing Plexamp headless. On the RPI I ran a UPnP renderer in my case upmpdcli which can be manually installed, and I think I also saw a docker image somewhere. This uses almost no resources and can receive UPNP audio streams.
There is even a HA add-on for it available here: https://github.com/szemod/upmpdcli-Renderer

Since Plexamp can not stream to UPNP renderers you need a bridge. Here is where plexdlnaplayer comes into play. It bridges the Plexamp stream to the upmpdcli . There is also this slightly newer fork of it available.

This solution used almost no resources and was working perfectly except for the odd disconnects between pledlnaplayer and the UPNP renderer.

Its not difficult if anyone knowledgeable about MA and the technical details picks it up. Unfortunately I have seen no itnerest in this subject so far except for end users who wish this was a thing: streaming from Plexamp to MA :-)

[Samurai1201]

As ovizii already pointed out, the effort to get a non plex client to be recognized as a casting target was already successfully achieved by https://github.com/songchenwen/plexdlnaplayer

So the chance of getting this worked into music assistant is higher than assumed, as the code doesnt seem to be proprietary.
Or at least someone already figured out a workaround.

[ovizii]

Apart from the Spotify Connect plugin, it seems like Music Assistant wants to be the “master” as in directing audio streams and not receiving audio streams. I mean fair enough but it's a pity. It would be really nice to be able to stream from Plexamp on my phone to MA and a specific player or playing local music files on my phone and stream them to MA.

On the other hand, if that is not a direction MA wants to take, fair enough.