Group distribution to enable JOIN/UNJOIN services in Homeassistant

[hcoohb]

Hi,

I continued the work started by @CyberDNS to implement the creation groups of musiccast devices.
It works in conjuncture with an update of the home-assistant platform that brings 2 new services JOIN and UNJOIN modeled after the sonos services.
That allows to easily create/modify groups within HASS, especially with the new lovelace custom card mini media player allows grouping.

It would be great to have a new version of pymusiccast with this PR so I can start pushing it through the HA repos.
Edit: the PR is somewhat ready for HA component to use the new services: commit for HA, and the PR for the mini-media-player

Let me know what you think.
Thanks and regards

[jalmeroth]

Hi @hcoohb & @CyberDNS,

thank you very much for the effort you put on this PR. I appreciate your work and I would like to help you getting this thing to life. I added some comments in this PR and the related HA-PR.

I know my code is far from perfect and every day I learn something new. :) But I would recommend you to review the HA-Style Guide and HA-Testing Section. There are guideline on how to check your code with flake8/pylint, which made me aware of the above mentioned errors. They will also point out some too long lines in your code.

I am looking forward to your updates!

Best regards,
Jan

[hcoohb]

Thanks for taking the time to review!
I will make the changes from pylint asap this week.

[hcoohb]

Hi @jalmeroth ,
I have finally found some time to tidy up quite few things.
It also allows to just push update to HASS if any of the distribution changes (especially if a client leaves) rather than HASS polling to confirm clients are still connected as I had it previously. (Update HASS code:here.

I also corrected so that this code passes flake8 and pylint too.
Happy for any feedback!

Thanks and regards,

[hcoohb]

Hi @jalmeroth , just wondering if you had time to have a look at the new commits so far, Thanks

[hcoohb]

@jalmeroth
Hi, just wondering if you have had the chance to look at this PR ?

[jodur]

Join and unjoin is the only thing that is missing. @jalmeroth please give this some attention!

[jalmeroth]

Fast-Forward some months… I finally own a second MC device and I am going to review, test and finally merge these changes soon™. I am sorry for the delay, but please bear with me.

[jodur]

@jalmeroth , no problem i am glad you are still in the land of the living and did not abandoned this project.

[jalmeroth]

Can anyone confirm or deny, if multi-zone capable devices (like RX-A2070) are able to link zones other than main to a distribution group?

cc: @buzz-b maybe?

[buzz-b]

Hi All, can you confirm what you mean by a distribution group. I;m not familiar with that term in my use of this great integration... :) I'm certainly able to use all my zones well now. Are you talking about 'linking' zones similar to that of the musiccast app?

[jalmeroth]

Are you talking about 'linking' zones similar to that of the musiccast app?

Exactly. :)

[buzz-b]

Hi, Apologies for delay. Just checked my MusicCast app, and I'm only able to use Zone2 as the Master Source on my amp, not Zones 3 or 4 (although I don't use Zone 4 - Yet). If I use Zone 2 as a Master then I can't link that to the Main or Zone 3, just to another MusiCast device (I have a sound Bar). If I use the amp 'Main' as the Master I can link to anything, and if I use another device as the Master I can then link to any zone on the main Amp. Hope that helps?

…

On Fri, Sep 13, 2019 at 4:44 PM Jan Almeroth ***@***.***> wrote: Are you talking about 'linking' zones similar to that of the musiccast app? Exactly. :) — You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#13?email_source=notifications&email_token=AHZBMZ437QE4CZNLR4CSG2TQJNHHVA5CNFSM4HCREYPKYY3PNVWWK3TUL52HS4DFVREXG43VMVBW63LNMVXHJKTDN5WW2ZLOORPWSZGOD6UMKQA#issuecomment-531154240>, or mute the thread <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AHZBMZ2XGKMY7DWMOD3T7C3QJNHHVANCNFSM4HCREYPA> .

[jalmeroth]

Thank you @buzz-b! This info will help to implement this feature correctly. :)

[jalmeroth]

Hi @ALL,

I began to re-implement this PR in https://github.com/jalmeroth/pymusiccast/tree/develop, since I wasn't happy with some design decisions. It's still a work in progress and not fully functional yet, but it shows where we are heading. I will continue to work there.

Best regards,
Jan

[TheZoker]

@jalmeroth Any news on this feature?

[jay448]

@jalmeroth I'm also very curious to see the Linking feature work

[jodur]

Any progress on this or is this project abandoned?

[CyberDNS]

Hi,

Is there something that can be done to push the things forward? I saw that there is another pull request from @uvjustin with no progress.

I have to admit that I am not really familiar with all the github processes nor adding all this to home-assistant, even python is not my thing 😉. So if someone is familiar with those things, I would be glad to help where I can, to make this thing possible.

Best regards,
David

[HeaDBanGer84]

@jalmeroth Pleas finish this merge! I use the custom component, but since this is the source code for the pip repository a merge and release or a comment if something needs to be done. Would be great.

[Clusters]

What's the status on this? It is still a custom component. Can the dead repo be replaced for HA?

[hcoohb]

For people still looking, (@Clusters ),
@ppanagiotis has implemented a custom integration based on my original PR, check it out here:
https://github.com/ppanagiotis/pymusiccast or available through HACS

Just note that with that version, you will not be able to group between zones