Music sometimes doesn't start via automation

[johnboiles]

What version of Music Assistant has the issue?

2.4.0b20

Have you tried everything in the Troubleshooting FAQ and reviewed the Open and Closed Issues and Discussions to resolve this yourself?

• Yes

The problem

A few times a week (I haven't found a pattern) my HA automation to play a playlist does not start the music. I see the queue get appropriately populated with the playlist, and music assistant seems to start to play for a few seconds (the button transitions from the play button to the pause button), then it gives up (the UI goes back to the play button)

Opening an issue as promised here.

In the log I see both FFMPEG processes exiting with code 255, which I think means they were killed by MA via a signal.

�[90m2025-01-27 10:51:19.607 VERBOSE (MainThread) [ffmpeg.53] Process ffmpeg with PID 53 stopped with returncode 255�[0m
�[90m2025-01-27 10:51:19.622 VERBOSE (MainThread) [ffmpeg.52] Process ffmpeg with PID 52 stopped with returncode 255�[0m

How to reproduce

Unsure!

Music Providers

Apple Music

Player Providers

HA Media Player w/ Home Assistant Voice ESPHome (Nabu Media Player)

Full log output

d5369777_music_assistant_beta_2025-01-27T18-51-48.554Z.log

Additional information

I've gotten this issue occasionally as long as I've been using MA (since ~September 2024)

What version of Home Assistant Core are your running

2025.1.4

What type of installation are you running?

Home Assistant OS

On what type of hardware are you running?

Raspberry Pi

[OzGav]

Please review the troubleshooting pages of the docs again. You need to narrow this down further so the devs can try and reproduce it.

[johnboiles]

@marcelveldt you mentioned that you've experienced this problem before and have seen reports on it on Discord. Do you have any ideas on how to narrow this further or reproduce? Should I increase the global log level to VERBOSE and see if that exposes anything?

[marcelveldt]

We have only seen this issue being reported with the Voice PE but then it was simply not possible to start music at all (this issue was there every time). A power cycle of the Voice PE fixed the issue. After the recent firmware updates of the Voice PE it was reported as fixed. Anyways, could have been a slightly different issue but it surely looks the same, what you see in the log is that the whole audio chain stops again because the player disconnected again.

Now you mention Apple Music and there is one thing about Apple Music and that is that sometimes retrieving the key takes a while so this could simply be a timeout. Did you ever test any other music source or only Apple Music ?