I haven't fully determined why, but when the Music Assistant server
restarts, it marks the _shairport-sync_ players as offline and will not
allow playing to them. The only way I have found to work around this is
to restart the players after the server restarts. As that's pretty
cumbersome and annoying, I naturally want to automate it, so I've
created this rudimentary synchronization technique using _ntfy_: each
player listens for notifications on a specific topic, and upon receiving
one, tells _shairport-sync_ to exit. With the `Restart=` property
configured on the _shairport-sync.service_ unit, _systemd_ will restart
the service, which causes Music Assistant to discover the player again.
_Music Assistant_ is pretty straightforward to deploy, despite
upstream's apparent opinion otherwise. It just needs a small persistent
volume for its media index and customization. It does need to use the
host network namespace, though, in order to receive multicast
announcements from e.g. AirPlay players, as it doesn't have any way of
statically configuring them.
Dustin