The Home Assistant Spotify Guide For Beginners

Connecting your Spotify account to Home Assistant allows for powerful and seamless music streaming across your entire smart home. With just a few clicks, you can enable multi-room audio, customize playback controls, set up voice commands, and automate playlists based on schedules or system events.

This guide will walk through the full integration process, core usage, advanced features, and FAQs to help you get the most out of the Home Assistant Spotify integration.

Overview of Spotify Home Assistant Integration

Home Assistant offers a native Spotify integration that connects your Spotify account to your Home Assistant instance. Once connected, you can:

• Play/pause/skip tracks on Spotify Connect devices
• View what’s currently playing in Home Assistant
• Build automations and scripts based on track info, devices, etc.
• Control playback via Home Assistant media players
• Cast music to Google, Amazon, and other speakers

The options are almost endless when you link up Spotify with Home Assistant. Read on to learn how to set up the integration and start building custom commands, scripts, and automations.

Connecting Spotify and Home Assistant

Connecting your Spotify account to Home Assistant is a fast and easy process thanks to the native Spotify integration.

Prerequisites

To connect your Spotify account to Home Assistant, you’ll need:

• An active Home Assistant instance – hosted yourself or via a provider. Home Assistant OS is recommended rather than Home Assistant Core for the easiest audio setup.
• A free or premium Spotify account that you can sign in to. Note that a Premium account is required for speaker group and multi-room streaming.
• A Spotify Developer application (free).

Create a Spotify Developer Account

Go to Spotify Developer Dashboard and log in or create an account

Click the Create app button from the top right of the dashboard page

Give the app a name and description. Agree to terms.

For the Redirect URI box enter: https://my.home-assistant.io/redirect/oauth

Once registered, view details and copy the Client ID and Client Secret as you will need this for the next steps when adding the integration to Home Assistant.

Adding Spotify Integration

To add the Home Assistant Spotify integration, simply follow the steps below.

1. From the HA front-end, go to Settings then Devices & Services.
2. Click the + Add Integration button to add an integration.
3. Search for and select Spotify.
   
4. Click to submit and open the Spotify authorization flow.

Signing into Spotify

5. The integration will redirect you to Spotify’s website.
6. Login with your Spotify username and password when prompted.
7. Click Agree to authorize Home Assistant to access your Spotify account.

Once authorized, your Spotify account will be connected to Home Assistant!

Playing Music on Spotify Devices

Out of the box, connecting Spotify to Home Assistant allows you to use the platform to play, pause, skip tracks and view what’s playing on Spotify Connect devices like:

• Smart speakers (Amazon Echo, Google Home)
• Smart TVs
• Gaming consoles
• Headphones/earbuds (if Spotify Connect enabled)

After linking your Spotify account, a new Spotify media player entity will automatically appear in Home Assistant.

Controlling Music Playback

On the Home Assistant frontend:

• Navigate to the Spotify integration card
• Browse featured playlists or search artists, albums etc.
• Click tracks, playlists or albums to begin playback
• Use transport controls like play/pause, next/previous track
• Adjust volume for connected speakers

You can also add shortcuts or visual buttons on your dashboard or in Lovelace to control playback.

Streaming Music on Speakers

To stream Spotify music throughout your home, you simply need to:

1. Ensure speakers are connected to your Home Assistant instance (Bluetooth, Chromecast etc).
2. In Spotify integration, under advanced options, enable audio streaming and select your audio output.
3. Start playback – music will now stream to the selected speakers.

Group speakers together from the configuration panel for synchronized multi-room audio.

Advanced Configuration

Once up and running with Spotify playback, you can further customize the experience:

Multi-room audio

Group speakers together like kitchen and living room for:

• Synchronized music streaming across rooms
• Single playback control interface

Group via Home Assistant’s media player integration, then select this group in Spotify config.

Customizing Playback Controls

Further tailor controls like:

• Compact mini-players
• Card-based UIs
• Dashboard buttons
• Tablet control panels
• Voice commands

All allow easy music control while presenting relevant information.

So if you have Spotify playing music on your Living Room Echo, the above services would control playback on that device.

Pretty cool right? Read on to learn how to build on top of that.

Displaying Spotify Info in Home Assistant

Beyond basic playback controls, integrating Spotify gives you access to a wealth of data about what’s playing within Home Assistant.

For example, your Spotify media player entity will expose attributes like:

• media_title – Song name currently playing
• media_artist – Artist name
• media_album_name – Album name song is on
• media_duration – Length of the song

You can display this info on your Home Assistant dashboard with widgets like Entity attributes, Mini media player, etc.

This data also opens up a lot of options for automation and scripting down the road.

But first, let’s look at how to build custom media player controls for Spotify.

This allows randomizing playlists or repeating that favorite track you just can’t stop listening to.

Home Assistant Spotify Automation Ideas

Here are just a few ideas to spark your creativity on ways to automate Spotify with Home Assistant:

Random Morning Playlist

Trigger a random upbeat playlist to start when your alarm stops in the morning. Simple way to start the day off right.

Bedtime Wind Down

When the last person goes to bed, pause Spotify and play a sleepy relaxation playlist to unwind at the end of the day.

Dinner Party Mode

Got friends coming over for dinner? When they arrive, pause any devices and cast a dinner playlist to your Google Home speaker in the kitchen.

Flash Briefing Playlist

Start each day with a personalized news briefing. When your morning alarm stops, play a special playlist while reading the daily news and weather.

The options are endless here. Next let’s look at some example scripts to actually build the automations.

Sample Home Assistant Spotify Scripts

To turn ideas into reality, here are two sample scripts for automating Spotify with Home Assistant using the script integration:

Random Morning Playlist

Configuration YAML:Copy code

script:
  spotify_wakeup_playlist:
    alias: "Wake Up Playlist" 
    sequence:
      - service: media_player.shuffle_set 
        entity_id: media_player.spotify
        shuffle: true
      - service: media_player.media_play
        entity_id: media_player.spotify 
      - delay: 00:05
      - service: media_player.volume_set
        entity_id: media_player.spotify 
        volume_level: 0.30
      - delay: 00:30
      - service: media_player.volume_set
        entity_id: media_player.spotify
        volume_level: 0.15

To enable, create an automation triggered by your morning alarm that runs the spotify_wakeup_playlist script.

Bedtime Ambience

Configuration YAML:Copy code

script:
 spotify_bedtime:
    sequence:
      - service: media_player.media_pause
        entity_id: media_player.spotify
      - service: media_player.select_source 
        entity_id: media_player.kitchen_speaker
        source: Night Noise Skill 
      - delay: 00:30
      - service: media_player.volume_set
        entity_id: media_player.kitchen_speaker 
        volume_level: 0.15

Automate by triggering the script when the last person goes to bed.

With some basic YAML, you can start bringing your Spotify automation ideas to life in Home Assistant!

Resources

Some additional references for taking things further:

• Spotify Integration Documentation – Technical setup details
• Automation Cookbook – Event triggers
• Blueprint Exchange – Automation code templates

Frequently Asked Questions

Below are answers to some common questions about integrating Spotify with Home Assistant.