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Failing to activate a player through Audiocontrol2 API

Chrisburrc

March 07, 2023 19:48

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I'm using the API to control my Hifiberry. I manage to pause a sound, or get the status, here is the output of the status get:

{"players": [{"name": "mpd", "state": "stopped", "artist": "Soundbox", "title": "kamoulox-bien-joue-gilles", "supported_commands": ["Next", "Previous", "Pause", "PlayPause", "Stop", "Play", "Seek", "Random", "RandomOff", "RepeatAll", "RepeatOff"]}, {"name": "spotify", "state": "paused", "artist": "Maler", "title": "Demone del tardi", "supported_commands": ["Next", "Previous", "Pause", "PlayPause", "Play"]}, {"name": "dlna", "state": "unknown", "artist": null, "title": null, "supported_commands": ["stop", "play"]}, {"name": "ShairportSync", "state": "stopped", "artist": null, "title": null, "supported_commands": ["stop", "pause", "next", "previous", "play"]}], "last_updated": "2023-03-07 20:46:34.361944"}

Now when I am using MPD and want to activate spotify, I post this URL:

http://192.168.1.10:81/api/player/activate/spotify

but nothing happens. Any suggestion here?

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7 comments

• 0
  
  HiFiBerry team March 08, 2023 05:10

  Many players doen't offer activation capabilities. To start spotify playback, you need to start some soing or playlist using the Spotify API.

• 0
  
  Chrisburrc March 08, 2023 09:55

  Thanks a lot for the quick answer. So just to summarise, my script does the following:

  1. Check if one player is active (I actually only use Spotify, but we are several users using it, it's not only me)
  2. Pause the player
  3. Play a sound via MPD
  4. Restart the active player

  Steps 1 to 3 work very well. But I fail short when restarting the active player. Do you think that with the Spotify API, I could resume playback on the spotify player, even if it was not my spotify account playing the music?

• 0
  
  HiFiBerry team March 08, 2023 11:07

  No, you can't resume playback on a stream of another user.

• 0
  
  Chrisburrc March 08, 2023 12:08

  So you'd say there is no straightforward way to resume spotify playback with the current hifiberryos setup? How about Vollibrespot? would there be a way to trigger the play function?

• 0
  
  Chrisburrc March 12, 2023 19:35

  Hi again,

  So I made some baby steps forward. First I found out that there is a bug report about this API command, reported here. 

  Basically when I execute:

  curl -X post http://192.168.1.10:81/api/player/activate/mpd

  as written in the doc, I get the error

  activate/mpd failed with exception 'AudioController' object has no attribute 'mpris_command'%

  Then I tried to execute

  curl -X post http://192.168.1.10:81/api/player/activate/org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.mpd

  and I get this error:

  activation of org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.mpd failed%

  So adding org.mpris.mediaplayer2 in front seems to provide the attribute to audiocontroller. But now, whatever I write after, instead of mpd, I get the same output. So it's like if mpd is not the right player name. I tried with the names provided by this call: http://192.168.1.10:81/api/player/status, but none works. I'm aware that this API call is not compatible with all players, but I would expect it to be compatible with mpd, right? How can I figure out the name of the players?

  Thanks in advance.

• 0
  
  HiFiBerry team March 13, 2023 07:24

  mpd is not using mpris anymore, therefore activation via MPRIS won't work at all.

• 0
  
  HiFiBerry team March 13, 2023 07:25

  If you want to control mpd, the best way is to directly use the mpd API