Playlist track not advancing in media player

[msknight]

I have a Pi 5 running HA and everything is up to date. MA is version 2.3.6 HA is version 2025.1.2

The music and playlists are located on a remote SMB share which is mounted from within MA (rather than Media). The error log is now quite clear except for the occasional warnings about the files missing the tag "albumartist" and using "Various Artists" as fallback.

The player is the only one I have and it's an MPD service running on a Raspberry Pi Zero which is provided by HA.

Files and playlists play fine. Music is coming clear with no buffering.

The HA Home assistant URL was working on automatic for local network with the IP, but I also inserted it into the section above it and rebooted, just to prove/disprove that. It was the only thing on the troubleshooting page which I believe applied to this issue.

However, despite all this, the display won't advance the track name. The playlist is being imported by an MA scan, so the playlist is being triggered from the MA database rather than calling an m3u file directly.

This is despite whether the playlist is triggered by a script, by the Play Media action in a button, or by selecting the playlist from within the MA GUI itself.

[OzGav]

So are you saying the playback itself stopped or just the metadata didn't change when the track did? If it is the former then significant improvements in queuing and a bug which can cause this have been added to the beta so try that. Still surprising that volume normalisation affected this...?

[msknight]

The metadata doesn't change.

The playback stopping was a previous issue with a solution that I hadn't seen covered, so I thought I would include it for reference... but I can see that I've just muddied the issue. My apologies.

[OzGav]

OK so playback is fine but metadata hangs up on the first track if volume normalisation is enabled. Is that correct?

[msknight]

Not quite. It hangs up on the first track regardless of normalisation.

Please forget about the normalisation... I confused the issue with that. My apologies. I've removed that part from the original post.

[OzGav]

OK then if it just a metadata problem then probably just an issue with using a HA media player. As per the docs

This player provider relies on the upstream HA integrations which have not necessarily been written or optimised for music playback. Therefore, if there is any way to use a MA provider you need to do so. Problems with HA providers will be addressed as resources allow.

But I will be honest there is not going to be any effort in addressing HA media player quirks any time soon if ever. Effort is on improving and adding to the native MA players.

You could test by putting picoreplayer on a SD card and booting that on your PI and seeing if that works OK with the squeezelite provider

[msknight]

Ah. So it's the media player that tells MA what it's currently playing, not the other way around.

[msknight]

Is there any way I can get MA to use the MPD instead of going through HA please?

[OzGav]

No MA provides the metadata but there is some issue in the pipeline from MA>>Integration>>HA>>Integration>>MPD software

Well you are using MPD as I understand it just the metadata is missing so that would seem to be as good as it is getting. I know people use MPD for other purposes so have a search on here and see if anything else comes up. Sorry thats about all I can suggest right now.

[msknight]

No worries. THanks so much for your time.