Starting a Google Play Music playlist on a Chromecast Audio?

[imaginator (Simon Tennant)]

Problem: Play music from a Google Play Music playlist (Monday, Tuesday, Wed…) on a Chromecast when arriving home. Stop / Pause when leaving home.

Potential solution: I have a bunch of Chromecast Audio’s wired up and able to playback. But I’m stuck on how to kick off a stream to them.

I’ve seen tools like CastNow, Mopidy and talk about using the Logitech Media Server. Am I missing something obvious? Do I need to run bridge service between Google Play Music and the Chromecasts? And if so what are others using and controlling through openhab?

I would have thought it was possible to just issue a smarthome:audio stream xxChromeCastxxx xxStreamxxx.

So I’m curious how others are kicking off playlists or radio stations from Google Play Music?

(Second question would be how to find xxStreamxx?)

[Celaeno1 (Alex)]

Maybe this topic could help you:

Rules documentation

@tom_bruton Be sure to have one of the current OH2 builds, e.g. SNAPSHOT build #1148. In documentation ( docs ) most of the channels are missing. In fact, there are the following channels: see here Link <channel id="control" typeId="control"/> <channel id="volume" typeId="volume"/> <channel id="mute" typeId="mute"/> <channel id="playuri" typeId="playuri"/> <!-- App Information --> <channel id="appName" typeId="appName"/> <channel id=…

[imaginator (Simon Tennant)]

@Celaeno1 thanks for the quick reply.

I guess my question is more about making Google Music accessible to the Chromecast binding. I had imagined that there was some kind of URL that one could just pass in that would represent a playlist, but further reading makes it look like I’ll need to run something like GmusicProxy to then have sane playback URIs. Still seems like a complicated setup.

[imaginator (Simon Tennant)]

To follow up I managed to get Gmusicproxy working. It’s actually a really nice way to access Google Music - URLS look like http://localhost:9999/get_by_search?type=album&artist=Queen&title=Greatest%20Hits and return a playlist of tracks that have stable names like http://10.7.11.1:9999/get_song?id=Tbjaahrmhzktoqvcvvjfqrzg6fa. That said, it mostly works, up until the part when playing happens .

Logged an issue and will update when I get further.

[wars (Ward)]

Is there also a possibility to send a normal playlist file to the chromecast which is located on my network?

[imaginator (Simon Tennant)]

@wars it used to be possible. However I’ve not been able to get this working again. And unfortunately it seems very hard to get any logs from the CC-Audio. I logged an issue about this. If I could find a way to debug Chromecasts / get a log from them, I’d love to look at this more.