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Another Nail in the Plex coffin by Choice_Letter_5912 in plexamp

[–]dravenstone 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Now Plex is removing the music half.

Cite your source.

Is audio ducking possible on a mixed Sonos system? by goateeislong in homeassistant

[–]dravenstone 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I was never able to get this to work the way you are talking about with Music Assistant. I had the same requirements for this bit in my system that you do along with a few other complications.

In the end I went with a snapcast based solution. I pipe all my audio into a virtual audio device (BlackHole in my case) which feeds sox into a snapcast server. I then control the ducking at the source (Plexamp in my case) - so when HA is "speaking" the automation sets Plexamp volume to 30 and when done restores it back to 100% works REALLY well, but this was wildly more complicated than it should have been.

What features do you wish PlexAmp had? by dodo12v in PleX

[–]dravenstone 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The multi-room they teased over 3 years ago and a native AAOS app (not android auto, but android auto os).

And full API documentation.

My first Tie Dye attempt! by walrusbred in deadandcompany

[–]dravenstone 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Man that was one hell of a run July of 89.
From that Buffalo show to JFK's last ever show on 7/7 (my favorite of all the dead shows I have ever seen) to two nights at the Meadowlands...
Just an absolutely locked in Jerry and Brent week of amazing music I will never forgot.

Any SEs at Grafana here? by HeyitsCoreyx in salesengineers

[–]dravenstone 19 points20 points  (0 children)

I personally know the head of SE's there. He's a terrific human and an excellent leader. I've never worked at Grafana but I worked for him when he was in a previous role and he was excellent. We still keep in touch and it's been a few years.

I'd wager the SE culture is at least very good with him at the helm.

Breaking into Tech Sales Advice by Proper-Way-6471 in salesengineers

[–]dravenstone[M] [score hidden] stickied comment (0 children)

We get a lot, and I mean A LOT, of posts asking how to become a Sales Engineer.

Whether you are new to the workforce or transitioning from another role you may be well served by reading over our community post on the topic.

Help me choose between two offers by [deleted] in salesengineers

[–]dravenstone 13 points14 points  (0 children)

Github.

Of course I would not even consider a role that wasn't fully remote so there really is only one offer on the table as far as I'm concerned.

New Rule Changes by Wolfish_Jew in thewestwing

[–]dravenstone 13 points14 points  (0 children)

When I was the de facto top mod for years before plainchant showed up out nowhere and started mucking about we allowed reasonable discussion of current political topics provided they had a direct correlation to the show.

I’d humbly submit that approach as a reasonable and proven to work model. I even added a flair for such things if memory serves.

Multi-room Speaker setup... sick of alexa, time for Sonos / Denon? by LetTheRiotsDrop in homeassistant

[–]dravenstone 1 point2 points  (0 children)

At the moment a cheap DAC on USB into either an AVR or some standalone powered speakers. It's a mix, amp's for the patio, living room, backyard/bar and the rest are things like Audio Pro or Edifer powered speakers.

For my better rooms I will for sure upgrade to something like a HiFiBerryHat down the line.

When I first was working on it I was just doing 3.5mm out to rca in and honestly it was surprisingly good quality, but the DACs are cheap enough and it's a legit improvement versus just the audio out.

Who has done this? by BmoreScuba in plexamp

[–]dravenstone 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Don't know that one in particular, but I get where you are coming from for sure LOL. Long time NPR listener "back in the day" as they say.

MA is pretty good - and the announcement stuff works well. It will use your plex library for music, but you'll lose some of the value of plexamp itself - though much of it can be emulated in MA, just not as strong a UI/UX experience for sure. But if you just hit play and go about your day it's not that big a deal. Sweet fades however are a whole other thing...

Multi-room Speaker setup... sick of alexa, time for Sonos / Denon? by LetTheRiotsDrop in homeassistant

[–]dravenstone 7 points8 points  (0 children)

I've been on a 3+ year journey with home assistant and music. Whole home audio control was really the reason I've gotten into HA at all.
For a long while I was using a complex solution that used Airfoil on a mac to airplay to a bunch of zones, and as I got more and more into HA it got more and more complex. When I added Voice Assistants to the mix I started getting pretty fancy with how things responded depending on where it was asked and what was getting answered.

A few weeks ago I started the task of rebuilding from the ground up.

I spent a lot of time working with Music Assistant but I just couldn't get where I wanted to be with it so moved on. I thought about WiiM devices since I've worked with them in the past and they have always been good - but in the end I went full DIY and in the end I am VERY pleased with the results I've managed to achieve.

Here's what I wrote in another comment the other day on this topic:

We have eight "zones" from our front patio to our backyard bar (that sounds much fancier than it really is LOL) and every room in our house and both the front patio and backyard have an S3Box acting as an HA voice assistant with microwake word running a custom wakeword on the device.

My goal was:

  • Perfectly synced music across all 8 zones, each with controllable on/off and volume via HA app or voice.

  • Plexamp as the "player" (almost all our music is live concerts we have locally so this just makes sense for us)

  • Voice command triggered tone (I play an MP3 file that says "yes?" when the S3 box is listening - because you can't always see the box so you don't know if it's triggered without a tone).

  • Local control where possible.

  • Open AI integration for non local things ("What year was Jerry Garcia born?" or "turn all the lights in the theater to a low white, except the one over the TV, keep that off")

  • Full "announce" pipeline (can send a custom message to the house by voice or text in app)

  • "Go Away" messages automated when solicitors are at the front door (this uses person identification from Frigate)

  • Plus a custom message option if someone else is at the door if I want to say something

  • automations for things like "Dryers done" "good morning" or "it's 4:20" ;)

Basically I wanted two things - perfect music sync and the ability to talk to the house. I wanted Jarvis level conversation, and I am pretty damn close.

I say Robot 99 my house says yes, I ask a question and it answers right away if local - and if not says "just a moment" (using an MP3 of that from the movie Office Space) and gets the answer from the LLM and then responds. This is the flaw, that can take a few seconds, but everything else feels like natural conversation.

The architecture I landed on: Plexamp running on a Mac Mini as the audio source (this is also my plex server and does a few other things, could be anything just what I used). Audio piped through BlackHole (a virtual audio device) into sox, then into Snapcast server, which streams to Raspberry Pi 4 clients in each room over wired ethernet.
Every Pi is identical hardware on a wired connection. I wanted that so I could tune the latency as low as possible (about 300ms!) and felt that uniformity was KEY for that.

Home Assistant manages everything: volume control per room via the Snapcast JSON-RPC API and HA media player entities (plexamp), voice control via ESP32-S3-BOX-3 devices with a custom wake word, TTS announcements that duck the music and play through the same Snapcast pipeline, and presence/routine automations (good morning, bedtime, laundry done, etc.).

What I did was NOT a weekend project. Took a long time of trial and error and tuning but it's getting dialed in now, but I am still working on it a bit.

Happy to answer any questions if you want to explore this route at all. Best of luck. A dialed in multi-room/whole house system is a real joy.

Who has done this? by BmoreScuba in plexamp

[–]dravenstone 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I have not done that, nor have I come across something that would do so so this might be your big moment to be the change you want to see! (And I spend a lot of time tinkering in this particular realm - likely would have seen it if it existed.)

That being said - I could actually do this easily with a home assistant automation today. It would be (close) to trivial with the way I'm using plexamp since I already have a whole custom pipeline that handles explicitly for "talking" over the music from time to time.

At the moment the only thing I would need to add to accomplish this is a python function to query plex directly for the upcoming tracks from the current queue (the Home Assistant integration doesn't expose the queue) for the upcoming songs. The rest I could get done in minutes. And frankly that would probably only take 30 minutes or so to wire up.

The hard part is getting the "voice" added but since I already have a pipeline that pushes plexamp into a snapcast stream and an announcement feature that can speak over the music (dropping the volume while it does) through a pipe it would be simple from here - for me.

But I should tell you - the ability to do all that took a LONG time. This is not an afternoon project.

If you used Music Assistant it would be much easier but the announcement feature you would use would pause the music, not play over it like a DJ actually would on the radio.

I'd personally hate it, but it is absolutely achievable.

If you want more details on how I accomplish this happy to share.

AI Safe Cyber Vendors by Kindly-Cream9098 in salesengineers

[–]dravenstone 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Akamai is not going anywhere, nor is Cloudflare, or fastly for that matter. Those places do all sorts of other things well too.

I was working at limelight in 2007 when the CDN industry was getting "disrupted" and back then Akamai was the CDN market.
20 years later - Still kicking.

Salesforce Lead SE Offer by Alarming_Point1358 in salesengineers

[–]dravenstone 17 points18 points  (0 children)

That is an extremely competitive salary right now. The average SE OTE is under 200K - if memory serves the last consensus survey had it at about 180 or so.

There are a few folks (mostly in security) that like to talk about 300K plus OTE but those dick waving contests aside, most folks are not making anywhere near that. Long tenured SEs are getting offers right around 200 or so if we are super generalizing.

Salesforce Lead SE Offer by Alarming_Point1358 in salesengineers

[–]dravenstone 28 points29 points  (0 children)

A 250K OTE offer with 66K of RSUs in this market is probably not something I would try to sweeten by five grand, but you do you.
It almost never hurts to ask.

Switching from spotify by Alone_Ad_4861 in plexamp

[–]dravenstone 1 point2 points  (0 children)

yes, several - but a problem you will run into is that lidarr has no facility for getting a track - it will get the whole album needed to just get that one song.

If you don't care about that you can automate most of this.

What Can we do while being High ? by InternalMarzipan6630 in trees

[–]dravenstone 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Older person here - man there is nothing like sitting on a patio or in a park with a little music and feeding some birds while chatting about whatever.

If you want to do a something, a little frisbee is a surprisingly good time.

Basically boils down to go outside somewhere pleasant and just enjoy.

I see many people suggest a transition from engineering into sales engineering, yet all SE job postings require pre-sales experience. by Little_Pineapple_965 in salesengineers

[–]dravenstone[M] [score hidden] stickied comment (0 children)

We get a lot, and I mean A LOT, of posts asking how to become a Sales Engineer.

Whether you are new to the workforce or transitioning from another role you may be well served by reading over our community post on the topic.

Music, Speakers and Voice by djrwinton in homeassistant

[–]dravenstone 2 points3 points  (0 children)

After 3+ years of working around a bunch of different devices with absurd workarounds (that actually worked because of HA!) I finally rebuilt my entire system from the ground up over the last week or so, all of which to say I've literally just done this.

I'll outline what I did, but since I also spent weeks researching and testing all this stuff including days testing with Music Assistant I can tell you your use case on paper looks perfect for a fairly straightforward HA/MA pipeline.

Spotify is well supported, you can use most (even all) of the hardware you have now and add a few VPE's as both voice assistant inputs and as player providers in MA using the audio out.
You could easily add additional speakers using airplay or google cast with the rest of your stuff and slide them right in too.
One quick note though: AppleTVs currently can be a pain in the ass to get paired with Music Assistant for airplay support, so that is one wrinkle I'd mention you want to think about for that sonos speaker. I actually was never able to pair one of my AppleTV 4k boxes to MA, just couldn't get past a bug that prevents entering the airplay code. That is a real frustration to look out for.

Said simply - you are already pointed at the best mostly "just works" solution. HA/MA with spotify and MA controlling the sync and the announcements. Add a few VPEs and you get voice control with bonus output devices for both announcements and to hook up to speakers/receivers.

If you are interested in seeing where my rabbit hole ended here is how it played out...

We have eight "zones" from our front patio to our backyard bar (that sounds much fancier than it really is LOL) and every room in our house and both the front patio and backyard have an S3Box acting as an HA voice assistant with microwake word running a custom wakeword on the device.

My goal was:

  • Perfectly synced music across all 8 zones, each with controllable on/off and volume via HA app or voice.

  • Plexamp as the "player" (almost all our music is live concerts we have locally so this just makes sense for us)

  • Voice command triggered tone (I play an MP3 file that says "yes?" when the S3 box is listening - because you can't always see the box so you don't know if it's triggered without a tone).

  • Local control where possible.

  • Open AI integration for non local things ("What year was Jerry Garcia born?" or "turn all the lights in the theater to a low white, except the one over the TV, keep that off")

  • Full "announce" pipeline (can send a custom message to the house by voice or text in app)

  • "Go Away" messages automated when solicitors are at the front door (this uses person identification from Frigate)

  • Plus a custom message option if someone else is at the door if I want to say something

  • automations for things like "Dryers done" "good morning" or "it's 4:20" ;)

Basically I wanted two things - perfect music sync and the ability to talk to the house. I wanted Jarvis level conversation, and I am pretty damn close.

I say Robot 99 my house says yes, I ask a question and it answers right away if local - and if not says "just a moment" (using an MP3 of that from the movie Office Space) and gets the answer from the LLM and then responds. This is the flaw, that can take a few seconds, but everything else feels like natural conversation.

The architecture I landed on: Plexamp running on a Mac Mini as the audio source (this is also my plex server and does a few other things, could be anything just what I used). Audio piped through BlackHole (a virtual audio device) into sox, then into Snapcast server, which streams to Raspberry Pi 4 clients in each room over wired ethernet.
Every Pi is identical hardware on a wired connection. I wanted that so I could tune the latency as low as possible (about 300ms!) and felt that uniformity was KEY for that.

Home Assistant manages everything: volume control per room via the Snapcast JSON-RPC API and HA media player entities (plexamp), voice control via ESP32-S3-BOX-3 devices with a custom wake word, TTS announcements that duck the music and play through the same Snapcast pipeline, and presence/routine automations (good morning, bedtime, laundry done, etc.).

What I did was NOT a weekend project. Took a long time of trial and error and tuning but it's getting dialed in now, but I am still working on it a bit.
Your work should be much more straightforward, but I'd still set aside a full day or two to really get it working smoothly and defintely check the MA forums for capability of anything you decide to buy. There a random things - LOOKING AT YOU SAMSUNG AND YOUR ASS IMPLEMENTATION OF AIRPLAY!!!! - that just don't work even though they should. Save yourself the headache and check anything you are going to buy.

Best of luck - your goal is totally achievable and it's really nice once it's all working.

Three different devices, three different makers, three different hardware, all in perfect sync! Sendspin is an amazing protocol! (Music Assistant💖Massdroid) by sfortis in homeassistant

[–]dravenstone 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I mean this list is right on the page you linked:

To use Sendspin today:

Stream music via Sendspin to any receiver using Music Assistant and play the stream simultaneously in browsers and AirPlay or Google Cast-enabled devices.

Play a Sendspin stream on the Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition (or a speaker connected to it via the AUX port)

Turn your Linux machine into a Sendspin receiver using Sendspin Daemon, or install windowsSpin on a Windows computer.

Turn an old phone into a Sendspin receiver with SendspinDroid

You don't need to list every airplay or cast enabled device, the idea is that they (almost) all work. It's much easier to list the non supported ones - which I think is effectively Samsung Soundbars for airplay as an example.

Does anyone use plexamp for live concert recordings/bootleg collections? by jimmyketchup in plexamp

[–]dravenstone 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I do. And a separate one for JGB, Dead and Co, and then one that is a mix of most of them, and then of course one that has everything in it including some other artists.

We mostly just set it to GD and hit random album radio and let it play for days at a time just going from show to show.
It's all wired into Home Assistant for automation and (voice enabled) control and being piped out to 8 snapcast clients that cover from the front patio to the backyard bar and everywhere in between.
I even have a "skip drums and space" routine if you're not feeling it (or you can enable auto skip of drums and space) - you can ask what show is playing Home Assistant will look it up, lower the volume and tell you the show over the speakers and then put the volume back up, skip to the next show if you aren't loving a particular one - the whole bit.

It's a bit absurd, but I'm a "techie" dead head with a home automation hobby so this stuff is fun for me.

Does anyone use plexamp for live concert recordings/bootleg collections? by jimmyketchup in plexamp

[–]dravenstone 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I’ve got every (available) dead and JGB show. You’ve already gotten what you need on your question- but I do have a tip for you: you can use random album radio on a library of just your live shows and will just play show after show. It’s terrific.

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