The built-in functions in Home Assistant does not seem to work with Bluesound when it comes to selecting source. But don’t worry, I found an easy fix.

I have a Bluesound node, that I use for my in-ceiling speakers. The node is responsible for my morning wake-up alarm, and I wanted to move the alarm function from the Bluesound app to Home Assistant. However, I couldn’t get Home Assistant to start playing a specific radio channel using the built-in functions, so I made a new function using the RESTful Command integration.

Requirements:
– You need to either know the DNS address of your Bluesound device, or give it a static / DHCP reserved IP address, or this will stop working when your Bluesound device gets a new IP address.

Start by setting your preferred radio channels and / or playlists up as presets in the Bluesound app.

Next we need to add our new commands to the configuration.yaml file.

rest_command:
  play_preset1_on_bluesound:
    url: "http://BluesoundAddress:11000/Preset?id=1"
  play_preset2_on_bluesound:
    url: "http://BluesoundAddress:11000/Preset?id=2"
  play_preset3_on_bluesound:
    url: "http://BluesoundAddress:11000/Preset?id=3"

Replace BluesoundAddress with the DNS or IP address of your Bluesound device.
Restart Home Assistant after adding this. This will give us 3 new commands in Home Assistant, with the possibility to start the first 3 presets.

Now when you go to your automation and look under actions, your can call a service and choose the new commands we just created.

You can of course create a lot more presets if you like, just change the number in both lines.
This is so simple that it should be included in the Bluesound integration in Home Assistant, but for now, we need to create it manually.

I use this every morning, and it works perfectly stable. I really enjoy the ability to control the volume fade in 100% in Home Assistant. In the Bluesound app, the fade-in was quite quick, and it often resulted in me waking up with a shock. I hope this article will help you wake-up more pleasant too.

This was made and tested with Home Assistant version 2023.12.4 and a Bluesound node N100.