AmpliPro player provider

[sumnerboy12]

Hi,
I am a noob when it comes to MA, but I love the concept and am very excited to see how it improves now it is an official part of HA.

I have a 6 zone AmpliPro music streamer which pipes music all around my house. I would love to see this integrated into MA and would be willing to give it a try myself if there is any documentation or help that might get me started.

One thing which makes it a little tricky and I might need help with is the way zones and sources are used in the AmpliPro. There are 4x sources or inputs and 6x zones. So you setup as many streams as you like, things like internet radio stations, Spotify clients, Lyrion Music Server clients, Pandora, etc. Then you assign one of these streams to each of the 4x sources. Then you set each zone to play one of the 4x available sources.

This gives you perfect synchronisation between zones, as they are actually playing the same source. But it makes integration with something like MA a little tricky.

E.g. if I select a song in MA and want to send it to my outdoor speaker zone, I have to create a stream on the AmpliPro to play that music (the easy bit I imagine), then setup a source to use that stream, and finally setup the outdoor zone to play that source. What happens if all 4x sources are already in use, on the other 5x zones?

It is all a bit convoluted! I am open to suggestions on the best way to integrate this type of system with MA, is there any other player provider that works in a similar way, I could have a look at for inspiration perhaps?

Anyway, hoping I can contribute and can't wait to get started!
Cheers,
Ben

[OzGav]

I know nothing about this device but I see you mention LMS clients. If the device is running squeezelite for the client then MA should detect that as a player automatically.

[linknum23]

I don't know much about this either but it looks like a custom player plugin to music assistant would be required to bridge music assistant with the AmpliPi/Pro's api if you wanted more than the current LMS interface provides. Depending on the details either a player would need to be instantiated per zone, or per audio source available on the AmpliPro. I anticipate they will probably need to be implemented per zone, which will be a bit awkward since only 4 things can be playing at once on an AmpliPro unit.
One starting point may be investigating how this is used to integrate with Sonos devices. Here is the current player interface used for Sonos: https://github.com/music-assistant/server/blob/dev/music_assistant/providers/sonos/player.py. These players would map to the per zone strategy, using grouping to join together to play the same thing.

[OzGav]

Looking at the specs I think you should right now be able to send three different streams to the device. MA should see it as an AirPlay device, a DLNA device and a Squeezelite device (assuming that’s what they mean by Lyrion Music Server)

[linknum23]

The software for the AmpliPro supports runtime configuration of which streams are being advertised, with the limitation of 4 active streams that are able to play music at any one time. This is a tradeoff that was made for configurability. A typical streamer device would advertise one of each stream service it supports, limiting the number each type of stream to 1. Instead you can have up to 4 of any type of stream, useful for a family that has 4 different Spotify accounts they want to stream simultaneously.

I realize this design does not map well to the normal streamer paradigm.

[linknum23]

Maybe this system diagram for a 6-zone unit with 4 DACs will help as well.

[OzGav]

If it does not support an existing provider protocol then you are welcome to develop one. There isn't comprehensive developer documentation yet but what is available is here https://github.com/music-assistant/server/blob/dev/DEVELOPMENT.md

You can ask for help here https://discord.com/channels/753947050995089438/1260489193763639338