[feature request] Show metadata on target player

Thank you for this wonderful integration.

I’m the maintainer of the linkplay media player component.

One thing I notice is that the target media player (the one really playing out the media) doesn’t show any metadata (from Spotify). So for example:

• go to lovelace, where you have a (physical) media player entity (eg. media_player.hang_up2stream)
• go to media browser selection
• choose Music Assistant
• choose Playlists: you can see all metadata appears at this level, tracks info and coverart etc
• select a playlist, press play
• playback starts on the media player, but no metadata is being shown
• also metadata is missing on the auxiliary media_player.mass_hang_up2stream

Usually linkplay devices provide some metadata via UPnP so when such information is available I parse it and import it. From Media Browser local files I just parse for “Artist - Title.ext” and if that matches I also grab cover from Last.FM. For Icecast radio streams, I look for ICY-Meta in the headers of the stream.

Is there a way I could fetch rich metadata from music assistant? Or should I provide a service for you to push metadata in (would be more accurate and less stressful)?

[marcelveldt]

I’m going to have a look at embedding ICY metadata into the stream if the player requests that in the header as a first step. Besides that I’ll provide some sort of hook and event to send the now playing info too.

[nagyrobi]

On that media player the full metadata should be available. If you’re missing something, let me know.

It’s not visible here at all: Top: the real media player entity Bottom: spit-out media player prefixed with mass

I’ve looked at ICY-Meta but that is normally used for radio streams. Not sure if it will also work for a flac/pcm stream.

Webradios are actually nothing more than audio streams. Icecast is a reputable server type which standardized the way audio streams can be optimally transported over http, and ICY-Meta is a good way implemented by Icecast to show real time metadata within the data flow. Webradios use this historically and the good part of it that it requires no extra service, textual metadata is embedded in the data flow and hardware players can easily display it too.

Actually TuneIn service is nothing more than just a directory, a collection of Icecast/Shoutcast streams, which in reality are all operated by the radio station owners themselves. So any player supporting TuneIn is in reality able to play Icecast.

Icecast supports FLAC by design and I don’t think there’s any reason why you couldn’t feed it with uncompressed PCM. I don’t mean by creating a full-blown icecast server just for this, but I think ICY-Meta can be embedded by various other means regardless of the stream compression algorythm. https://icecast.org/faq/

Another approach could be that I fire an event on the HA eventbus with the media details, for you to pick up ?

I’d be happy to test this, and add it as extra functionality to my component. For example if the stream URL itself would follow a uniquely recognizable pattern (currently it’s http://ha.ip:8096/media_player.hang_up2stream.flac as I’ve noticed, say, if we agree that the 8096/media_player + something unique to this component substring will allways be there) I could know that the source of metadata information is on the event bus.

But I have zero experience with any sort of event bus programming so I’m all ears… What I’d like to get is:

• media_image_url
• media_title
• media_artist
• media_album_name
• media_position
• media_duration

And it would be super great if I could push back to you a “Next”, “Prev” and “Seek” commands from the real player towards the “Spit out” player (or event bus?), as that’s the one exposed to the user.