LR3 AudioZone — Home Assistant Add-on

English | Česky

Spotify Connect → ELKO EP "LARA". The add-on finds LARA radios on your network and offers each of them in Spotify as its own Connect device, named after that radio — plus "LARA All", which plays to all of them at once. You pick where the music goes on your phone, and the add-on switches the radio into its audio zone (acting as a Slim server). When you stop playing, the radio returns to its station list. No fallback radio, no presets.

The sister project LR3-Stream is just the stable stream + Spotify Connect (no radio control). LR3-AudioZone adds output to LARA via Slim.

 "LARA Bathroom"   librespot ─► Liquidsoap ─► Icecast /lara_f2231c ──► LARA Bathroom
 "LARA Living rm"  librespot ─► Liquidsoap ─► Icecast /lara_aabbcc ──► LARA Living room
 "LARA All"        librespot ─► Liquidsoap ─► Icecast /all ─────────► both at once

        SlimProto server (:3483) ── strm ──► radios  (tells them what to fetch)
        LMS CLI server  (:9595) ◄── state + buttons ── radios

How it works

1. On start-up the add-on scans the network and finds LARA radios along with their names (TCP 61695 sweep).
2. For each radio it starts its own librespot → the radio shows up in Spotify as a separate Connect device named after it (e.g. "LARA Bathroom"). With two or more radios there is also "LARA All", which plays to all of them at once. With a single radio the group device is not shown — it would just be a second name for the same speaker.
3. Each zone's audio flows through Liquidsoap into its own Icecast mount. When Spotify is not playing, the mount carries silence — so it never goes down and a LARA can start fetching it at any time.
4. The add-on is also a Slim server — two services:
   • SlimProto on TCP :3483 — audio transport, volume, powering outputs on/off.
   • LMS CLI on TCP :9595 — the text channel the LARA uses to ask what is playing and to send its own button presses back to us. This is also how we feed it the track title and artist, so the display shows the playing track, not the zone name.
5. When Spotify starts playing, the add-on sends strm-s to the affected radios → they switch into the audio zone and play. A radio's own device takes precedence over the group: start music on "LARA Bathroom" in the middle of a group session and the bathroom leaves the group while the others keep playing.
6. Volume is controlled by the slider in the Spotify app. It is the only control — during audio-zone playback the LARA's own volume buttons only mute/unmute, so volume cannot be set on the unit itself.
7. When Spotify stops and idle_timeout passes, the add-on sends strm-q, mutes the outputs and, over port 61695, returns the radio to its station list — stopped, so the zone does not hang on the display and the radio is ready for whoever walks up to it.

New radio on the network? The set of Connect devices is fixed at start-up — after adding a radio, restart the add-on. Until then the add-on does control it (it follows "LARA All"), but it gets no Spotify device of its own.

Prerequisite: point the LARA at HA as its slim server

Every LARA must have "Audio zone function" enabled in its configuration, with the slim server IP set to your HA address and the CLI port matching the cli_port option (default 9595). Set it either in the ELKO Configurator, or directly in the LARA web UI (http://<lara-ip>, admin/password login) → the "Audio zone function" section. The SlimProto port is 3483.

Configuration

Option	Default	Description
port	8121	Icecast stream port (this is where the LARA fetches audio from).
source_password	changeme	Icecast internal password. The LARA does not need it.
bitrate	192	Bitrate of the MP3 sent to the LARA (kbps).
spotify_bitrate	320	Spotify quality (96/160/320).
audio_cache_mb	200	Spotify audio cached on disk per zone (0 = none). It was a fixed 1 GB each until 0.3.7 — four zones meant up to 4 GB written to the HA Green's soldered storage.
spotify_remote_access	false	Off: no Spotify login is stored, zones are visible to everyone on your network and to nobody outside it (turning it off also deletes a login stored earlier). On: the last account to select a zone stays logged in and sees it from anywhere.
zone_name	Audio zóna	Fallback name — used only when no radio is found.
group_name	LARA All	Name of the device playing to all radios (only with 2+ radios).
lara_name_prefix	true	Prefix names with "LARA " ("LARA Kitchen" vs. "Kitchen").
scan_subnet	empty	Subnet to sweep, e.g. 10.0.0. Empty = the one HA lives in.
zone_volume	90	Volume set on the radio when the zone turns on. 0 = leave the radio's volume alone.
buffer_seconds	1.5	How many seconds the LARA buffers before playing = the main source of latency. Lower = snappier, but risks dropouts.
idle_timeout	8	Seconds of Spotify inactivity before the LARA leaves the zone = how long the zone lingers on the display after the music stops.
control_mode	slimproto	slimproto = control the LARA. off = discover and log only (testing).
park_on_zone_off	false	Off: when the music stops, only the stream is stopped and muted; the radio keeps showing the audio zone until somebody touches it. On: also switch the source back to the station list over port 61695. See the note below before turning it on.
cli_port	9595	LMS CLI port — must match "CLI port" in the LARA's configuration.
cli_username / cli_password	empty	Login the LARA sends on the CLI (if it has one).
lara_username	admin	LARA user — required for the return to the station list (port 61695).
lara_password	elkoep	LARA password.
lara_hosts	[]	Manual LARA IPs for when the broadcast can't find them.

Updating from 0.1.x? The fallback_enabled, fallback_url and fallback_delay options are gone. If the add-on complains about unknown options after updating, open its Configuration and save it again (the Supervisor keeps previously saved options). fallback_delay was replaced by idle_timeout.

⚠️ Radios locking up (open issue)

At one three-radio site two LARAs froze so hard they needed the mains pulled — buttons dead, web page dead, invisible on the network. The cause is not identified. 0.3.6 turns off or bounds everything the add-on does that a normal Slim server would not; most importantly the switch back to the station list over port 61695 (park_on_zone_off) is now off by default.

If it happens to you: pull the mains, and before you do, try a short press of the RESET pin and see whether http://<radio-ip> still loads — that answer is worth more than anything else. To take the radios completely out of the loop, set control_mode: off and un-tick "Audio zone function" in each radio's own web UI.

Status

• ✅ The whole loop verified on HA with a real LARA (fw 3.7.001): Spotify starts playing → the LARA switches into the audio zone and plays (~2 s behind); stop the music → after idle_timeout the LARA returns to its station list.
• ✅ The display shows the playing track — title and artist go out over the LMS CLI (:9595).
• ✅ Volume is the Spotify slider — the one control. On this firmware the radio has no usable volume path of its own: its buttons only mute/unmute during zone playback.
• 🧪 Not yet exercised: several LARAs playing at once (the multi-radio code shipped in 0.3.0) and calibration of the zone_volume scale.
• Test tool that needs no add-on deployment: python tools/zone_test.py <this-machine-ip> --proxy <mp3-stream-url>