Top story for Tuesday, October 13, 2026

Music Assistant prevents large album covers from exhausting a small server’s memory while music plays. Beta users on 4 GB Home Assistant hosts reported the add-on stopping after a few skips through music they had not played before.

Home Assistant gives owners who serve its interface over HTTPS a choice of updated encryption profiles without silently breaking older clients. Existing installations retain their previous profile; a repair offers a newer one, and a five-minute trial restores the old setting if the change locks the owner out.

Home Assistant’s Model Context Protocol server gains a read-only option for giving AI clients access without allowing changes. When enabled, the configured endpoint lists only tools marked read-only and refuses calls to the others.

ESPHome refuses a second wireless firmware upload while another is running. A command-line update and a web upload could previously write over each other; on ESP8266, that could leave a damaged image that needed a cable to reinstall.

ESPHome lets a device configured only as a Wi-Fi access point open its controls directly on a connected phone, without internet. Its web interface is embedded in the firmware instead of being loaded from an unreachable website.

Music Assistant preserves an ESPHome Sendspin speaker’s existing player when an update changes its identity for encrypted connections. Its settings move to the new identity while the player identifier stays the same, keeping groups and Home Assistant automations attached to the speaker.

Home Assistant extends dynamic device naming to entities that an owner has named. Renaming the device then updates those entities too, while dashboard cards, badges and rows without an explicit name use the device name followed by the entity name.

ESPHome adds power management for ESP32 devices using ESP-IDF, allowing the processor to slow down and optionally enter light sleep when its main loop is idle. Supported chips can also power down peripherals and flash during sleep.

Home Assistant corrects a failure that made a discovered MQTT device trigger run its automation twice for one message after a connection reload. Discovered tag scanners could likewise report a single scan twice, even though the broker delivered the message only once.

Music Assistant represents AI Radio shows as ordinary radio items, letting them appear in the Radio library, receive favourites and shortcuts, and start through Home Assistant’s normal playback action. A show’s fixed track list plays to its end instead of continuing through Autoplay.

Home Assistant’s Android app properly stops its background location and activity tracking when the owner disables those features. Previously, it did not reliably unregister the tracking work after either setting was switched off.

Sendspin’s Python server corrects timing failures that could leave grouped speakers audibly out of step after audio production stalled. Different formats could end up 15 to 357 milliseconds apart, and pausing and restarting did not always realign them.

Home Assistant’s Tailscale connection switches to OAuth client credentials, removing the recurring need to replace API access tokens that expire after at most ninety days. Connections using an old token stop loading and request the replacement credentials when this change reaches their installation.

Music Assistant strengthens the boundary around a Local files source so playback, artwork and library scanning read only files inside its chosen folder. It checks the file it actually opens and hands that same open file to its media tools, avoiding a second lookup of a path that could have changed.