Google Cast (Google Home and other cast compatible speakers)

[marcelveldt]

Music Assistant has full support of the "Google Cast" platform and it is in fact one of the preferred solutions to use Music Assistant. The cast platform is used on the Google line-up of speakers such as the Google (Nest) Home and Hub but also a very wide range of other manufacturers adopted the Cast platform such as JBL, Harman Kardon and Sony. So in theory you can have a group of speakers from different brands playing the same music in perfect sync.

General notes

• Home Assistant documentation for the cast integration: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/cast/
• Music Assistant streams audio to the speaker(s) using a local streaming service hosted on TCP port 8095 by default. make sure this port is reachable from your cast speakers on the local network. The IP sent to the speaker is resolved from the "internal URL" field within the Home Assistant configuration.

Features:

• Supports all speakers supported by the cast integration form Home Assistant
• Supports Google cast groups, they will be listed as speaker group in the Music Assistant interface
• Due to the fact that the cast platform has no "power" support, Music Assistant will automatically use mute as power control. This allows you to play audio to a cast group and "power on" group childs.
• The cast platform has no support for metadata sent by the kind of stream that Music Assistant is sending, this means that the only metadata you will see in the Google app or display is "Streaming from Music Assistant"