Home assistant should support current version (with zones!)

[jwiese]

It wasn't clear where else to discuss this. Should we be updating the home assistant component, or working on supporting it as an integration? Are there current efforts to update the home assistant component/write code for an integration, or should I start from scratch?

[rytilahti]

Hi @jwiese and thanks for opening a discussion on this! I think the proper way is to make the current homeassistant integration to support multiple zones, my question is: is there something that is blocking this? Earlier this year, I started to do some refactoring to provide a nicer API for the future, but alas I'm not able to work further on that until late this year.

I could push those changes to a separate branch if that'd be of any help, but if there is nothing blocking making it work with the current API, I'd say go and create a PR on the homeassistant integration.

[rytilahti]

This homeassistant arch issue is relevant: home-assistant/architecture#364

[ztark12]

I really miss the function of being able to control zones from Home Assistant.
Wouldn't it be possible to add one media player per zone like Onkyo (https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/onkyo/) and Yamaha Network Receivers (https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/yamaha/)?
My programming skills are very limited and I have tried to find a way to implement it without success.

[The00Dustin]

I have the same question and limitation as ztark12. I see jwiese mention an STR-DN1060 in #114 but I fail to see how #78 is relevant to controlling the device itself in HA. I simply need to independently power on/off and select source for the Zone 2 and HDMI Zone on my STR-DN1080. I should imagine separate media player entities are the optimal way to do this in HA since that's how multiple other integrations do it. To that end, a previous read of python-songpal documentation last year made it look to me like this would be possible there using the songpal zone command, but I couldn't test because I couldn't get pip to work on my mac (iirc). Given that the media player functionality exists in HA and but the songpal integration in HA specifically only supports songpal sound it seems to me like the subject being discussed here ("with zones") would fall on the HA side. Meanwhile, maybe there is something else I don't understand since all of my outputs are wired and I have no other songpal experience, but speaker groups seem like a whole separate thing vs zones.

ETA: OK, immediately after posting this, it occurred to me that the media player integration in HA could be the issue leading to discussion (if it doesn't support specifying zones for the source selection), perhaps that's where "with zones" and component vs integration discussion come in. In that case, sorry if my post is more noise than substance.

[rytilahti]

I don't use the device I used to develop this library for a long time now, but there has been some activity around improving the homeassistant support, just for reference:

• Extend Songpal to provide settings as separate entities home-assistant/core#63145
• Add Sony Songpal group and ungroup services home-assistant/core#66911

@Flameeyes or @maximoei, if you are still interested in pushing your improvements forward, let me know if you need some help with testing / codeviews / changes in this lib and I'll see what I can do.