Making WLED Lights React to Music — Without a Microphone

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 03:57:14 +0000

How I wired Home Assistant, Music Assistant, a Raspberry Pi, and a WLED ESP32-S3 together to get audio-reactive lights driven entirely from the music stream — no microphone required.

(Claude helped with both the project and this post)

The Goal

I wanted my WLED-controlled lights to react to whatever was playing through my HiFi system — pulsing, flashing, and shifting colours in time with the music. The catch: I didn’t want a microphone picking up room noise, and I wanted it to work automatically whenever music played, without any manual intervention.

Esphome Based Marantz Remote

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 04:30:31 +0000

In 2025 I started adding more and more things to Home Assistant, starting with my Daikin A/C and temperature/humidity sensors. One of the thing I wanted was to manage my audio system.

Over the years I have tried multiple things, including using a raspberry pi with a recreated Pi Music Box implementation based on docker. I eventually settled for using said raspberry pi as a headless Spotify player connected to my Hifi. This meant that my only source of audio was Spotify, which to be fair kind of worked but limited my choices. I also had a DVD-CD player connected to my amplifier and my whole collection of CD ripped in FLAC format, but I rarely used the first option and didn’t have the second one accessible to be played.

Home Assistant on Endemics blog

Making WLED Lights React to Music — Without a Microphone

How I wired Home Assistant, Music Assistant, a Raspberry Pi, and a WLED ESP32-S3 together to get audio-reactive lights driven entirely from the music stream — no microphone required.

The Goal

Esphome Based Marantz Remote