Needing to restart Music Assistant after a HA restart for Yamaha MusicCast

[muibeta]

Music Assistant Play media actions to a Yamaha AV Receiver target are "ignored" after a HA restart unless Music Assistant is also restarted. It appears the official MusicCast integration must find the Yamaha AV Receiver before Music Assistant starts. On a HA restart, I always have to remember to manually restart Music Assistant or write an automation to restart the Music Assistant add-on after HA starts (5 minutes later?).

For the MusicCast integration, the AV Receiver has the entity media_player.family_receiver.
For Music Assistant, with the MusicCast provider enabled, the AV Receiver has the entity media_player.family_receiver_3.

When Music Assistant is restarted, Music Assistant displays what the Yamaha AV Receiver is playing i.e. media_player.family_receiver_3 lists (for example) the TUNER is playing. If Music Assistant is not restarted, media_player.family_receiver_3 shows the Music Assistant queue is playing, which usually is an Internet Radio station saved to the library from the RadioBrowser provider.

Running the following action from the automation editor always displays the pop-up "Action completed successfully" even when the Yamaha Receiver has not changed its source to SERVER, meaning the Internet Radio station is not heard. If I have not restarted Music Assistant, media_player.family_receiver_3 shows it is playing, but media_player.family_receiver continues to play what was playing, e.g. TUNER (instead of SERVER). No errors are being logged that I can find related to the action having run.

action: music_assistant.play_media
metadata: {}
data:
media_id: ABC Radio Sydney
enqueue: replace_next
media_type: radio
target:
device_id: 2c7e3af483ad7e57e9c8f6dcd3f368bb

My environment is HA Home Assistant OS Core 2026.2.1 running in a Synology DSM Virtual Machine. Music Assistant is version 2.7.6. The Synology NAS and the Yamaha RX-A4A AV Receiver connect to the same 1Gb unmanaged Ethernet switch.

[OzGav]

It sounds like you are using the HA integration. If so you need to use the native MA provider.

[muibeta]

Thanks, OzGav. I am using the native MusicCast provider which lists my 5 MusicCast devices, two of which have 2nd zones, hence 7 players. When the action is shown in the visual editor, the icon on the target indicates it is a native MA device.

[OzGav]

The why did you say “ It appears the official MusicCast integration must find the Yamaha AV Receiver before Music Assistant starts. ”

[muibeta]

As a write, the Yamaha "Family" Receiver is playing the sound from a Sony TV. The MusicCast Web UI shows this as External. If at this moment I restart Home Assistant, it with show the last Internet Radio station played from the library.

My theory is that if Music Assistant restarts after Home Assistant, Music Assistant is able to determine the status of Yamaha receiver. If Music Assistant starts as part of a Home Assistant restart, it is unable to determine the status of the Yamaha receiver, and whatever ends up getting sent to the Yamaha receiver during a Play media action does not result in it changing to its SERVER source.

From the Developer tools states

[fmunkes]

Should HA's musiccast integration be active, can you please disable it for all players? I know that you'll loose some ability like treble level etc, but I am currently working on having that exposed via MA to HA as well. I did see some issues when both integration were active lately, so please disable HA's MC integration completely.

[muibeta]

Hi Fabian, I need features in the Home Assistant's MusicCast integration. I actually need the HACS Yamaha (YNCA) integration as well. Having to remember to restart Music Assistant after a Home Assistant restart is manageable.

The original task was to have an Internet Radio station play in multiple rooms in sync at 7am each morning. This was first achieved using HA's MC integration to recall a Yamaha Receiver Internet Radio preset (for the NET RADIO streamer in the Yamaha Receiver) and join the other rooms. Some days the Yamaha Receiver cannot find the stream. (Yamaha use Airable to resolve the URL.) As a backup, I am using Music Assistant to stream the Internet Radio station and HA's MC integration to join the other rooms. Should Music Assistant not play the station, the final fallback is to recall a DAB preset. Only the Yamaha (YNCA) integration supports recalling DAB and FM presets. All of this is performed by an automation, which ensures a version of this station is playing within 20 seconds. This method also allows the station to be changed easily from the Yamaha MusicCast android app or sending one more Play media action from Home Assistant.

[fmunkes]

Ok, sounds like you thought this through very well - but I guess then I can't change anything on the provider, to remove the restart task unfortunately.

[muibeta]

The behavior I am seeing appears to be linked to whether there is anything displayed in the Music Assistant queue for this Yamaha AV Receiver when Home Assistant is restarted. When the queue is zero Music Assistant does not have to be restarted after Home Assistant to have subsequent play media actions (for a Music Assistant device) work as expected. Manually clearing the queue from the Music Assistant WEB UI always clears the queue.

I have been working on clearing the queue from automations that run at appropriate times. The only method I have found to clear the queue in an automation is the media_player.clear_playlist action with the Music Assistant device (for this Yamaha AV Receiever) as the target. The media_player.clear_playlist action does not always clear the queue. What appears in the queue in the Music Assistant Web UI may be a source other than from Music Assistant, so what would be the outcome of a media_player.clear_playlist action at that moment? (I am confused as to where the queue actually exists. Is it in Music Assistant or is Music Assistant displaying a queue in Yamaha AV Receiver?)

[OzGav]

MA only shows its queue