Spotify

Controls playback on your own Spotify Premium account via the Spotify Web API - the only integration in Athena that needs a real browser-redirect OAuth2 consent screen instead of a local-network handshake.

Connecting

Devices & Services > Spotify > "Add account" redirects your browser to Spotify's own consent screen; approving it redirects back to Athena and saves the account automatically - there's no local pairing step and nothing to type in by hand. A background token refresh keeps the connection alive indefinitely, so a restart never asks you to log in again.

What you get

• Playback - play/pause, next/previous track.
• Volume - a direct 0-100% control (replaced an earlier ±10%-nudge version that could only guess a relative change).
• Shuffle & repeat - shuffle on/off, repeat off/context/track.
• Seek - jump to a position within the current track, bounded by its own length.
• Now playing - current track and active device, read-only.

Live state is polled every 10 seconds (Spotify's own real-time push mechanism is a browser-only JavaScript SDK, not something a server can use). Works with Dashboard cards, History, and Automations exactly like every other integration - it also shows up as a Media player alongside your other speakers/TVs.

Turning a speaker into a Spotify Connect device

Separate from the account above: an ESPHome-backed or Sonos Media player can be turned into a real Spotify Connect device of its own - the kind that shows up in the actual Spotify app's own "Connect to a device" picker, the way a Chromecast would. Open that media player's own detail page and use its "Spotify Connect" card to give it a name and enable it; from then on it's selectable from any Spotify app on the same network, independently of the account connected above. Requires Spotify Premium. An ESPHome media player specifically needs its own device to support WAV or FLAC playback to be enabled this way - Athena automatically streams whichever format the device prefers; Sonos has no such restriction.

Once enabled, that card's own "Manage speakers" button turns it into a real speaker group - pick any number of other eligible speakers (grouped by Area, with a per-area and a global "select all") and they all play the same stream together. This is practical multi-room sync for audio Athena itself is relaying, not true sample-accurate hardware sync - different speaker brands have no shared sync protocol with each other, so each member independently fetches and plays the same stream rather than staying perfectly locked together the way, say, two real Sonos speakers in a native Sonos group would.