Overview

OwnTone is the new name of forked-daapd. I was previously using forked-daapd as a way to play music to my HomePods via automations in Home-Assistant.

I wanted a solution to play a sound through our HomePods when someone pressed the doorbell. It seems that OwnTone and Home-Assistant might be able to do this - let’s investigate!

Investigation

The OwnTone docs discuss the API usage and here I’ll demonstrate what I tried using a VM running on 192.168.1.19:

Clear the queue, add anything of kind “music” and play:

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curl -X POST "http://192.168.1.19:3689/api/queue/items/add?expression=media_kind+is+music&clear=true&playback=start"

Get a list of artists:

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curl -X GET "http://192.168.1.19:3689/api/library/artists"

‘Justin’s House’ (the only file I have in this test library) is artistID: 8537665808708412949

Get all the albums by artist ‘Justin’s House’:

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curl -X GET "http://192.168.1.19:3689/api/library/artists/8537665808708412949/albums"

The album, ‘CBeebies’ is albumID: 513209088573595807

List the album tracks:

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curl -X GET "http://192.168.1.19:3689/api/library/albums/513209088573595807/tracks"

The track, ‘Who’s at the Door?’ is trackID: 21

Can we play that trackID directly?

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curl -X POST "http://192.168.1.19:3689/api/queue/items/add?uris=library:track:21&clear=true&playback=start"

Playing through Home-Assistant

As a rest command in Home-Assistant that would be:

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rest_command: 
  doorbell_ring:
    url: "http://192.168.1.19:3689/api/queue/items/add?uris=library:track:21&clear=true&playback=start" 
    method: POST

Putting that into an automation like:

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alias: Doorbell
description: ''
trigger:
  - platform: state
    entity_id: binary_sensor.doorbell
    to: 'on'
condition: []
action:
  - service: rest_command.doorbell_ring
mode: single