How Necessary Is a Dedicated Music Assistant Remote to You? (Astrion MA Integration — Feedback Wanted)

Astrion
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The problem we all know too well

Music Assistant has quietly become one of the most capable open-source multi-room audio platforms out there. Native speaker grouping, gapless playback, crossfade, queue transfer between rooms/zones, search across all your connected providers — tracks, albums, artists, playlists, radio, podcasts, audiobooks — it’s all there, and it works remarkably well.

But controlling it? That’s where things get awkward. Right now, most of us are either pulling out a phone, opening the MA web UI on a tablet, or using generic media player entities in Home Assistant that only expose basic play/pause/skip/volume — no MA-aware browsing, no proper queue management, no multi-room grouping controls.

There’s a gap between what MA can do and how we interact with it.

Quick ask for the MA community:

Sanytron is evaluating direct Music Assistant API integration for the Astrion remote—native library browsing, queue control, multi-room/group management, search, etc. Before this goes further, I’d love to gauge real demand: Is this something you’d consider essential, nice-to-have, or unnecessary?

What does your current MA control workflow look like?

What would make a dedicated remote worth it for you?

If you already use a phone/tablet/HA dashboard, what’s missing? Please reply with:

  1. How necessary? (Must-have / Nice-to-have / Don’t care)

  2. Top 1-3 features you’d need

  3. What you’d pay / whether hardware remote matters. Keep it honest—negative feedback is just as useful.

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Astrion Smart Remote 2026 Version Evolution Plan and Milestone Roadmap
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Must have for remote

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Must have, def want a more flexible audio player that you can link properly to volume contol to a different device to the streaming entity. As well as triggering scripts from any button.

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Hi, for me this only would be a nice to have. Using ipad and Apple Music currently. But maybe this would be a way to move to MA.

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For me it’s unnecessary. I am using UPnP/DLNA protocols to stream music in CD or better quality from my server to a dedicated renderer. Having tried putting Music Assistant in the loop, it transcoded all my high resolution audio files to lower quality producing an audibly poorer result in most cases.

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A hardware remote is perfect for this.

A function to add now playing to a selected playlist would be helpful. I frequently want to add tracks from the dynamic daily playlist on Tidal to a new playlist that I’m building for (say) a holiday. The workflow is based on playing a curated playlist that may already align and then picking the most suitable tracks.

Being able to move across several curated playlists would be useful to pin down the top level genre, before listening to tracks and selecting some. A process of user-driven AI (or other selection) playlist selection, filtering, saving, building, to reach a final new playlist.

Some randomness (stochastic behaviour) can be fun for new discoveries.

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I hope I’m not late to this. I just got an Astrion and I would consider this a Must-have. I was already been eyeing that blue button on the bottom for a dedicated MA button before I saw this thread.

I have a long-term project of making a fully-local media server that doubles as my (not-smart) TV’s frontend - hopefully a Home Assistant frontend - and the Astrion having MA integration is perfect for that. I live in a shared apartment where not everyone is interested in messing with smart home stuff, so if this remote is going to truly replace the rest of the remotes in my living room it’s important that can function as a painless multimedia portal for anyone picking it up.

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We are considering how to effectively integrate the control of MA and HA