I am VERY new to home automation and have invested in a smartthings hub and a couple of R3 speakers. I also use Alexa.
My question is - what is the point in adding the multi-room speakers to smartthings? I need to use the Multiroom app to play music (no need for smartthings app) alexa will only send music to the speaker if its connected via bluetooth (and without any need for smartthings app).
It makes sense to add philips hue lights, webcams and the likes as i can access them fully via smartthings, but why bother with speakers? I have no interest in having audible alerts, i only ever play music.
Sorry if the question seems stupid - but i just dont get it!!
I think the point, generally speaking, is to play music or get alert sounds, text-to-speech, etc. on your connected speakers in response to a condition or trigger that comes from ST (e.g. when you come home in the evening, turn on your home audio system, set the output to your connected speaker, play a particular Spotify station).
Right so you are saying that you can set a trigger to play spotify through multiroom speakers via smartthings?
Fantastic! Thats EXACTLY the sort of functionality i want.
I cannot for the life of me work out how to do that however, any chance you can give a very brief overview? Or point to a thread that expains it? Nothing i can see in the smartthings app allows me to do anything like that…
Sorry I don’t really have a connected speaker (except my echo and dot) so I haven’t implemented anything like this myself. Just going by what I’ve read on the forum in the past. The exact solution will probably depend on your speaker and what music source it’s connected to. And you’ll probably need a device handler and/or smartapp that’s developed by this community rather than the built-in options that come with the ST mobile app.
Right now, the SmartThings official features don’t give you granularity. You can turn the speaker on and off, and you may be able to have a play voice notification depending on the speaker capabilities, but you can’t select a specific station or playlist.
Option 1: use a harmony activity
If your multiroom system does work with harmony, you can set up a harmony activity for a particular favorite station and then you can have that harmony activity triggered from SmartThings. It may not be everything you want, but it is fairly easy to do. Sonos is a good example.
Option 2: use custom code for a specific configuration
There are some individual community members who have done some projects that can do some granularity for some specific devices. And if that sounds like a lot of qualifiers, it is. There’s no one smart app that can handle granularity in general.
And in many cases these will require quite a bit of technical expertise as you may need to also set up a separate “man in the middle” server to work with it.
@ule has some code that can select stations from a specific service, “radio tunes.”
And @infofiend has done a lot of work on Sonos integration down to the playlist level.
You will find both of these and more on the quick browse lists in the community – created wiki under project reports for A/V projects.
Thanks for the post but just confirms my opening post really. There is literally no point at all in adding them to smartthings unless you want notifications.
Not about to drop a fortune on Sonos gear when i have R3’s. Harmony looks interesting but again, its more outlay.
Thanks for all the help guys, i am a bit dissapointed that there is not more functionality considering all the components are made by the same company. Seems like Samsung are missing a trick. Hopefully when Amazon finally get around to bringing speaker sync to Alexa, it might be worth it.
Um, no that’s what I’m trying to say. They are not only good for notifications. Whether you want to add other functionality probably depends on your definition of huge effort.
I agree with you it would be nice to have more functions built into the ST mobile app.
