Help me understand HE "Music Player" capability

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1

I've perused the posts about "Music Player" and still don't quite understand.
There does not appear to be a built in HE Music Player. Is the Music Player functionality just a dashboard tile?

I'm trying to figure out if HE could serve as a Music Player in my situation, which is:

  • Old school speakers connected to Denon Receiver that I've managed to connect to Hubitat.
  • a bunch of music files saved from my physical CD's (I think these are called "ripped" files?), some in mp3 format, then others in flac (after I was advised that was better).
  • No iTunes, no Spotify, no Alexa, no Siri, no Google, no Sonos, no smart speaker and not going to have any of those

Currently I've got the music files playing through the receiver by downloading Kodi to an old android phone, and putting the music files on a USB plugged into my router. What I like is that I can create playlists that go beyond just a group of 5 CD's on a CD changer. However, it's a bit of a kludgy setup, so I was thinking of repurposing an old Lenovo Yogi laptop/tablet combo to run Kodi and be a touchscreen dashboard for HE. Reading posts about a HE "Music Player" has me wondering if there is a better way to do this. Requirement is that it must work with no internet.

  1. Is there some way I can play these files using only HE and avoid Kodi?
  2. If no to 1, is there some way I can use HE dashboard as the only interface to play the files, with Kodi only in the background?
  3. Other that I have not yet thought of?
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2

It is a capability that adds a bunch of additional commands like play, stop, setTrack, etc. You can see the full list here:

The inbuilt Sonos integration includes a Sonos Player driver that includes the Music Player capability with all of those commands. They basically tell the Sonos device to play a specific track. EchoSpeaks Alexa devices also have the Music Player capability too.

All this said I don't believe it will support what you are after.

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3

Thank you. Appreciate the clarification.

5

I don't have a Sonos.
However, are you saying that since my Denon is on the same LAN as Hubitat, I could potentially use Hubitat to direct the Denon to play songs from networked devices through the Denon?
Which HE app do you use to get the "Play Track" command? I can't get to that from Rule Machine - it only has set volume, mute/unmute and sound tone.
Can you play just one track or can you also play a playlist?

7

The inbuilt Denon AVR Driver doesn't have the Music Player capability unfortunately.

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8

The inbuilt Denon AVR Driver doesn't have the Music Player capability unfortunately.

@ritchierich Do you know if the community Denon driver has the capability to do what is being discussed in this thread? I can also ask over ther at that discussion...

9

Sorry I don’t and have only used the inbuilt one.

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10

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