Changing snapcast group volume unmutes all clients

[chatziko]

I have a snapcast group with 3 speakers (clients), say A,B,C. Often I want to temporarily mute C while A,B are still playing.

Now while C is muted, in snapweb I can still change the volume of the group, which changes the volumes of all clients A,B,C, but it does not unmute C. This makes sense, changing the group volume does not show an intention to unmute any particular client. If, on the other hand, I change the volume of C, it is automatically unmuted, which again makes sense, since I am interacting with C directly.

In MA, however, the behaviour is different: changing the volume of a snapcast group immediately unmutes all members of the group! Is this intentional or just a bug? I don't see a benefit in this behaviour, while the risk of unexpectedly blasting a quiet room with music is clear.

[OzGav]

Probably not intentional so I’ll change this to a feature request

[SantiagoSotoC]

This is implemented this way because at the moment the MA ui does not have a way to manage muting. I understand that it is not ideal, I will see how it can be improved.

[chatziko]

In general the link between MA volumes and snapcast volumes seems strange to me.

I have two snapcast clients, named A, B. I link B to A, so now:

• in MA there are 3 volume sliders, one for the group (named "A", cause A is the "master" speaker), and one for each of A, B.
• in snapcast there is one group and two clients.
  (note that in snapcast the group volume is computed as the average of the clients, it cannot be set independently).

I start by setting all volumes to 100. Now in MA I change the group volume to 50.

• In MA the group volume becomes 50, the volumes of A,B stay 100.
• But in snapcast, the volume of A stays 100 while B becomes 50! (and the group becomes 75, the average).

This is completely unexpected, why B changed to 50 but not A?

I reset everything to 100 again, and now in MA I change A to 50. Now:

• In snapcast A becomes 50, B stays 100 and the group becomes 75 (the expected behaviour)
• In MA A becomes 50, B stays 100 but the group also stays 100 (so now there is an inconsistency between the MA group and the snapcast group).

Changing B to 50 has similar behaviour as changing A to 50.

PS. Thanks a lot for you work, MA looks super promising, I'm currentlt changing all my music setup to it.

[OzGav]

It’s certainly not consistent with how group player volumes are supposed to work. The group volume should be the average of the children. Changing the group volume should have a proportionate change on the children (eg. Change group by 10 all children change by 10 and average then recalculates)

[SantiagoSotoC]

Yes, the main problem is that the values are updated in the ui when using snapweb but not when using the ma interface

[SantiagoSotoC]

My solution works, but I don't think it's ideal, I already asked in the library repo, I'm waiting for a reply and I'll update here.
Where can we talk about adding a way to control the mute from the ma ui ?

[OzGav]

I think in th #devs-playerproviders channel?

[SantiagoSotoC]

It is implemented in the server and in the providers, it is the ui that does not support it.

[SantiagoSotoC]

music-assistant/server#1324
I think it's fixed now, I removed the mute logic and fixed the volume.