Playing tags isn't working

[Ramblurr]

Problem: You cannot play tags with roon.play_media(zone_id, ["Library", "Tags", "mytag"]) It also doesn't work in HA when using the media browser.

Error:

  File "/var/home/ramblurr/src/mycroft/mycroft-core/.venv/lib/python3.10/site-packages/roonapi/roonapi.py", line 579, in play_media
    if take_action["hint"] != "action":
KeyError: 'hint'

Looking at the JSON output from the roon api, you can see that the action hint is not there:

{
    "items": [
      {
        "title": "Brass",
        "subtitle": "1 Item",
        "image_key": null,
        "item_key": "730:0",
        "hint": "list"
      }
    ],
    "offset": 0,
    "list": {
      "level": 1,
      "title": "Tags",
      "subtitle": "1 Result",
      "image_key": null,
      "count": 1,
      "display_offset": null
    }
  }

Yet from the Roon app one can search for a tag and then shuffle it, so there's got to be some way to play tags.. any ideas?

[Ramblurr]

Submitted a PR to fix the crash, but one still can't play tags.

When browsing one level deeper into the tag itself, the json is:

{
    "items": [
      {
        "title": "Play Tag",
        "subtitle": null,
        "image_key": null,
        "item_key": "785:0",
        "hint": "action_list"
      },
      {
        "title": "Gallowstreet Brass Band",
        "subtitle": "Artist, 3 Albums",
        "image_key": "00aab2e33650023564000d856df09be7",
        "item_key": "785:1",
        "hint": "list"
      }
    ],
    "offset": 0,
    "list": {
      "level": 1,
      "title": "Brass",
      "subtitle": "1 Item",
      "image_key": null,
      "count": 2,
      "display_offset": null
    }
  }

You can see the "Play Tag" action_list.. browsing into that:

{
    "items": [
      {
        "title": "Shuffle",
        "subtitle": null,
        "image_key": null,
        "item_key": "821:0"
      },
      {
        "title": "Start Radio",
        "subtitle": null,
        "image_key": null,
        "item_key": "821:1"
      }
    ],
    "offset": 0,
    "list": {
      "level": 3,
      "title": "Play Tag",
      "subtitle": null,
      "image_key": null,
      "count": 2,
      "display_offset": null,
      "hint": "action_list"
    }
  }

The shuffle and start radio actions do not have hints! Is this a bug in the roon api?

[Ramblurr]

For comparison, here is the action level of an Artist, notice the hints

{
    "items": [
      {
        "title": "Shuffle",
        "subtitle": null,
        "image_key": null,
        "item_key": "835:0",
        "hint": "action"
      },
      {
        "title": "Start Radio",
        "subtitle": null,
        "image_key": null,
        "item_key": "835:1",
        "hint": "action"
      }
    ],
    "offset": 0,
    "list": {
      "level": 3,
      "title": "Play Artist",
      "subtitle": null,
      "image_key": null,
      "count": 2,
      "display_offset": null,
      "hint": "action_list"
    }
  }

[pavoni]

Thanks for the investigation.

My guess is that it is a bug in the api as you suggest, but hard to be sure.

I spent quite a bit of time experimenting to get the radio stuff working, which isn’t very consistent with the artist / album browsing.

If you’ll willing to experiment - perhaps start by changing the code to ‘default’ the hint if it’s missing and see how the code copes.

[Ramblurr]

Yea, I tried by commenting out the final check for the hint..and the tag "station" played as expected. That's why I think it's a Room bug..the hint should be there.

One could check if the title of the supposed action key has one of the action keywords in it, like "Play" or "Shuffle" but I'm not sure if those strings are localized or not depending on your Room Core language

[pavoni]

I think defaulting it if the key isn’t there is reasonably safe (since the hint key really should be there!)

I’d add a comment describing the case, and saying we suspect it’s a bug.

Could even add a debug log trace if the key is missing saying we’re assuming this is an action - will help debug should it cause unexpected behaviour in the future.

The consequences of thinking it’s an action if it isn’t aren’t too terrible. I think the code will just think it was able to start playing when it didn’t.

Since the code blows up if the key is missing, it can’t be happening in other ‘happy’ paths.

Some of the earlier code did check the play strings, but that felt risky to me, partly localisation, but also roon could easily change the strings (and they vary quite a bit).

In general I’ve been trying to make the code more robust across roon version changes.

[pavoni]

BTW the code path for playing via the browser might be different, although harder to test that since you need to integrate into HA.

[Ramblurr]

Sounds like a plan. Let me know of you want me to make another PR.

I'm building a Roon skill for Mycroft (an open source privacy first voice assistant) using your library
https://github.com/Ramblurr/mycroft-roon-skill

It's working really well.. it's just a huge PITA to search for media but this isn't your fault, it's that the roon browse API is designed for GUIs not programmatic search.

[pavoni]

Wow - cool project!

I can imagine playing media is hard.

The best I could do is fake up some paths

https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/roon/

[Ramblurr]

Yea, in my first version of the roon skill I was using your "paths" and it worked, but it was quite slow from the users perspective due to all the API calls behind the scenes. So today I rewrote it to just use the browsing api, walking/traversing the different levels.

BTW I use the paths feature in Home Assistant..we have lovelace dashboard buttons for our favorite Roon playlists.