God idk how I missed that, but thank you

It works well.

I have done the same thing with custom hardware, ESPHome, and routed the output to my old Yamaha AV receiver with an IR blaster in the device for auto source switching and volume control.

I can’t wait for music assistant to integrate Spotify connect because right now you can only play saved playlist/albums or some recent music, no browsing.

A media player component plus microphone plus voice assistant.