u/corganmurray

Hey friends,

I use Music Assistant to control my local music library through HA, and recently I noticed the album artwork was no longer showing up as the background of my dashboard's media players. I saw a few older threads about this while investigating the issue myself and wanted to share the fix that worked for me.

In Music Assistant's settings, under "Webserver", there is a "Base URL" field followed by a "TCP Port" field. At some point, I had updated the base URL to my local IP of "http://192.168.4.82" and the TCP port to "8095", which looked good to me and seemingly worked, but it turns out you actually need the TCP port included in the base URL, too. Music plays fine without the port setting -- just the artwork I noticed issues with.

Once I updated my base URL to be "http://192.168.4.82:8095", my album artwork started appearing again.

BEFORE:

media players missing background images

AFTER:

media players with background images

I wanted to make a quick video to show just how fast a fully local, voice controlled setup can be using a fairly low powered mini PC. The camera pans between my family dashboard and the microphone I use, and that music is coming from my local library (powered by Navidrome) and playing over a pair of Sonos speakers.

This is all running on a Beelink S12 with 16 gigs of RAM, which is split between a VM with Home Assistant and another VM with Plex and all the usual arr* suite stuff. I’m using ONNX with Nvidia parakeet as my speech to text engine, and I’m actually running that and Piper on my Plex VM, as opposed to using the Home Assistant add-ons. That helps speed things up, in my experience.

In this video, I start an album using my voice. Once music is playing, I repeat my wake word, which ducks down the volume to hear my next request (I stole that from Alexa), and then I load up some different music, and as you can see, it’s all pretty snappy.

To make things more realistic than usual, I recorded this video while the washer and dryer were going full tilt behind me, and that cheap little M5 atom echo hears me just fine, even with my noticeable accent :)

EDIT: sorry for the confusion, I should've said “no LLMs”, not “no AI”, as the speech to text engine kinda falls into that category. I guess the more important thing is that this setup is totally internalized and doesn’t require a GPU heating up my basement :)

Hey friends, I am using a fully local voice assistant set up to control my music library. Most of the time it works great, but there are some band names that it just cannot deal with.

For example, two of my favourite bands are Lagwagon and NOFX (40 year old white guy in the house!), and I have not figured out a way to say that with my slight Cape Breton accent that can be correctly transcribed.

I just set up a script that catches things like “play leg wagon” and “play leg wedding”, which is how whisper interprets me saying that , which works but clearly isn’t ideal. Before I continue down this dark rabbit hole, I was wondering how other folks deal with this.. I am using the small whisper model.

Initially, I tried tying in an AI, with the “process locally first” option enabled, in hopes it would work as a back up, but the extra delay was too much, and my wife was deeply unimpressed.