I’m not sure I follow. Do you mean when you set a default set of colors at the dashboard level and then individually customize the color of a tile?
If so, you can choose one of the semi transparent colors for the tile.
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Hey folks, just curious if I’m missing something here but the album art shows the headphones icon and text through the station art when the station uses a transparent PNG file. Is there a way to control the background of the album art so that the default headphone icon and text are not displayed when the tile is live?
Same question for the text above the tile showing the Echo device it’s being played from.
Thanks! Gary
Hi Gary! Welcome to the community and thanks for posting.
Let me see if I can reproduce this and see if we can improve the experience. It looks like you’re playing a radio station which is returning a semi-transparent image for the album art rather than more traditional full bleed artwork. I’ll let you know what I find. 
Thanks Josh! Most of the stations from iHeartRadio seem to use the transparent images. I also use XM Radio and it too uses transparent files but those usually end up with a white background.
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Hi Folks,
I’m also experiencing where the album art and the audio track aren’t updating. I do see the changes in the Hubitat side.
Under the Capabilities, I’ve noticed that audioTrackData tag isn’t there but scrolling down, I do see it but it’s greyed out. Just below that, I see trackData that is not greyed out. It is updated correctly. Can someone please help me in the right direction in rectifying this? TIA.
Which attribute is changing on the Hubitat side?
Did you perhaps change types/drivers while testing this device at some point? The device shouldn’t report both of those attributes.
If so, the normal approach is to delete the device and reonboard it so it doesn’t have those remnants that shouldn’t exist anymore.
You can manually clear these out, but it can be a bit finicky…
Manually Clear States without Reonboarding
Take note that ‘type’ of devices that’s currently being used in the Hubitat Admin UI for the device details. You can temporarily change the ‘Type’ of the device to Device (and save). Then you’ll see a command / button for Delete All States. If you tap that, it will clear out all the states for the device including ones that might be remnants from previous drivers. Once that’s done, you can change the type back to the original type and save - sometimes you’ll need to tap the Configure or Refresh command again to get some base attributes showing data again.
Once that’s done, you should be able to run through the authorization process to sync the device over to SharpTools. If the old stale attribute is removed from the device in Hubitat, but still showing in SharpTools, feel free to send a note to support with the Doc ID of the device and we can manually clear out that attribute for you if you’ve performed the other steps.
Thanks Josh for the prompt reply.
On the Hubitat side, both the trackData and audioTrackData are changing correctly, but on the Sharptools side, only the trackData is changing but the audioTrackData isn’t.
I went to do the manually clear states as per your instruction and now the audioTrackData on the Sharptools side is now just {}.
What driver is this with? Only one of those attributes is usually set, so something seems off with the driver.
The system defaults to audioTrackData if it’s available and falls back to trackData. But audioTrackData should only be available if the Audio Track Data capability is included on the device and thus only gets event subscriptions if that capability is included.
In the Hubitat world, it’s more common to see trackData from the Music Player capability.
What about in the device states within the Hubitat UI? Do both audioTrackData and trackData have states and are still updating together?
Yes, both are updated together on the Hubitat UI. I even tried ActionTiles and it is receiving the data correctly but just not on Sharptools.
I might have missed it, but I didn’t see an answer to my other comment. There’s something quirky about this driver as noted above. Which driver is it?
Hi Josh,
Something to add…
When I bring up the more info screen of my Echo, I see NA for the Track but when clicking on it, it’ll bring up the correct Raw Track Data.
But yet the album art and the song title are still not showing up.
Hi Josh,
My apologies. I must’ve been drunk when I answered your question about which driver I was using for Echo Speaks, but here they are:
Echo Speaks
- Echo Speaks v4.2.2.0 (app)
- Echo Speaks - Actions v4.2.2.0 (app)
- Echo Speaks - Zones v4.2.2.0 (app)
- Echo Speaks Device v4.2.2.0 (driver)
- Echo Speaks Zone Device v4.2.2.0 (driver)
From a quick look at the Echo Speaks driver, it looks like there’s an oddity (bug?) in the implementation as it manually defines an ‘audioTrackData’ attribute without using the ‘Audio Track Data’ capability. That means that SharpTools is preferring the attribute at runtime, but an event subscription isn’t setup for it since the associated capability is missing.
Ironically, it looks like a comment in their code shows they added that attribute for SharpTools. (Which I suspect might have originated from their SmartThings variant of the driver which they have since sunset)
As a side note, we pushed out an update ~1 week ago which drops the legacy ‘trackDescription’ attribute and instead prefers the data included in the audioTrackData or trackData if either are set (in that order). That might clean up your ‘NA’ track, but you’ll still have the issue of stagnant data per the above.
I’ll take a look to see if we can add some extra logic to work around this oddity. You could manually tweak the driver to remove all the audioTrackData references, then clear the state as mentioned further up in the thread, and things would work after that. But anytime the driver is updated in the future, the audioTrackData features would get reintroduced and break things.
Hi Bruce. We pushed out an update which should address this. Can you refresh the page displaying your dashboard and try again to see if the album art and track data displays as expected now?
Thank you so much for the update, Josh.
I just did a quick test and it seems to be working fine. I’ll do more in depth testing in the next few days and see how it goes but so far, so good.
Thank you so much once again.
Bruce
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Hi Josh,
Something I’ve just noticed. Whenever I play a song or skip a track using the Sharptools music control, it will display the song title and album art perfectly fine, but once that song is over and continue on to the next song on my playlist, both the title and art don’t refresh themselves. Even if I refresh the dashboard, it doesn’t do it. It’s only if I use the music controls again then it will refresh.
EDIT: Additional testing
Further testing, it seems that the Echo Speaks “echo devices” isn’t refreshing automatically when the next song is played. Only when I refresh then it’ll update the Sharptools title and art.
Is there a way to do a force refresh?
UPDATE:
I managed to set up a rule through the Hubitat Rule Machine to do a device refresh when the music is playing. I’m not sure if this is the proper way or if it is a workaround. It seems to work now even though the album art refresh still takes around 60 seconds after a new song is played.
BTW, the album art is squared dimension. Is there a way that I can modify (perhaps via CSS) to change its aspect ratio to 3 high by 4 wide? Something like the media scaling with contain, cover or fill options.
I would recommend posting in the Echo Speaks thread. The device author would be best suited to provide guidance on troubleshooting why the device isn’t updating state itself.
You can edit the tile settings and adjust the dimension to 3x4 or whatever dimension you want and the album art will automatically scale (cover) the tile accordingly. If you still need CSS help, you might consider creating a separate thread or posting in one of the existing CSS threads.