How to play a Spotify playlist shuffled?

[derandiunddasbo]

Playing a Spotify playlist in random order seems to be quite straight forward, but I didn't get this running. This service call simply doesn't do anything, neither playing anything, nor throwing any errors in the log:

service: mass.queue_command
data:
  command: play_media
  uri: spotify:playlist:xxx
  mode: shuffle_mode_on
target:
  entity_id:
    - media_player.mass_bath

When omitting the mode argument, the playlist starts to play fine. Isn't that the correct way to use the mode argument? And if not, how else do I use it?

[OzGav]

I am looking at how the mode command should be used but in the interim you can try this to set the shuffle mode on. Add this as a subsequent service call:

service: media_player.shuffle_set
target:
  entity_id: media_player.mass_bath
data:
  shuffle: true

Indeed you don't need to use that special MA service you can just use the normal HA media player commands as I understand it.

[derandiunddasbo]

Indeed, the items seem to be re-shuffled (most of the time), when adding a playlist to a queue set to shuffle. But sometimes the same song seems to be "stuck" at the first position, when issuing the play_media command with the same list multiple times and only the subsequent items become re-shuffled. That led me to the supposition, that the playlist always starts with the first item two days ago.

But TBH I can't reproduce this reliably at the moment and while this occured several times two days ago, today I saw it only once.

Anyways: I'll watch this behavior, but maybe this isn't an issue, unless I'm in "testing mode", restarting playback two times a minute. :-)

But what do you mean by "enqueue set to add"? There are 12 queue commands, but no "add" command:

CMD_PLAY = "play"
CMD_PAUSE = "pause"
CMD_NEXT = "next"
CMD_PREVIOUS = "previous"
CMD_STOP = "stop"
CMD_CLEAR = "clear"
CMD_PLAY_MEDIA = "play_media"
CMD_SHUFFLE = "shuffle"
CMD_REPEAT = "repeat"
CMD_SNAPSHOT_CREATE = "snapshot_create"
CMD_SNAPSHOT_RESTORE = "snapshot_restore"
CMD_PLAY_ALERT = "play_alert"

[marcelveldt]

why are you using the music assistant service for this and not just the regular play_media service ?
it has everything you need...

[marcelveldt]

What do you mean with this:

Anyways: I'll watch this behavior, but maybe this isn't an issue, unless I'm in "testing mode", restarting playback two times a minute. :-)

[derandiunddasbo]

why are you using the music assistant service for this and not just the regular play_media service ? it has everything you need...

TBH, when asking this question, I wasn't fully aware of the fact, that the mass media player entities are acting like regular media players in Home Assistant. Maybe this is trivial knowledge for long time MA users, but some weeks ago I didn't even know about MA and for me as a first time user, the installation and usage instructions on the Github page weren't that clear about how to actually use MA. Maybe some config examples would have make this easier to understand, but as of now, it's hard to find any real world configs from other MA users.

[OzGav]

I have opened an issue to remind us to improve this. Thanks!

[pjdreger3]

when using the regular media player commands would the URI be

spotify:uri:playlist name

where playlist name is the name of the playlist as shown in MASS?

[OzGav]

Please review the FAQs for the answer to this.

[OzGav]

Old v1 info