[Announce] 'MediaServer' *certified* Alexa skill for LMS

[philchillbill]

There's a new full-feature certified Alexa skill to control LMS in the Alexa skills store. It's called MediaServer and you can find it by browsing under the category 'Music & Audio' in the Alexa app or web-portal. Because this is a certified skill, it's available to anybody with an Alexa/Echo device without any kind of developer or beta accounts.

A downloadable installer automatically sets up the required password-protected https proxy to your LMS instance. Available for pCP, Linux and Windows, it's not an LMS plugin as such but instead deploys (free) ngrok to tunnel to LMS using TCP over SSH.

MediaServer has been extensively tested on a library with 70K+ songs - how well it will work for you will (logically) depend on how good your tags are. It uses a freemium model, and is available in English for both the en-US (for the USA) and en-GB Amazon stores (26 countries in EU). Altogether, it supports 123 intents, of which 74 are in the free-to-use class.

The skill can 'stream' LMS audio over WiFi to your Echo as audio-sink. Any transcoding of audio formats not supported natively by the Echo is performed automatically by LMS. New: Lossless URLs saved in your LMS favorites now stream without unnecessary transcoding directly to your Echo.



Cover art and/or textual metadata are displayed on your Echo's screen (if present) for all commands. This uses 6 different APL templates that provide visual feedback from Alexa - great when the music is loud and it's hard to hear her responses. This is also useful as a training aid as you can see Alexa's misinterpretations in all their textual glory.

Some example commands (see also https://mediaserver.smartskills.tech...#section-4-1):

Play the album 'Ghost Stories' by Coldplay
Play the compilation album 'American Road Trip'
Play the single 'Sunny Days' by Armin van Buuren
Play the song 'Chasing Cars' by Snow Patrol
Play something by The Corrs
Play songs about Girls
Play songs featuring Eddie Vedder
Play a random album by Steve Winwood
Play a random single by Madonna
Play some Classic Rock
Play my Supperclub playlist
Play a random playlist
Play the track 'Run Like Hell' from the album 'Pulse'
Play the 'Live & Dangerous' rendition of 'The Boys are Back in Town'
Play favorite number 3
Play favorite 'JAZZ FM'
Play favorite 'Podcasts' item 7
Play favorite folder 'Audiobooks' item 12
Play favorite 3 . 2 . 5 (dot)
Play my newest album by Pearl Jam
Play index 3 from the album 'Musique' by Daft Punk

^*Using 'Stream" instead of 'Play' in the above commands will direct the LMS audio to your Echo device instead of a Squeezebox player (using /stream.mp3)

What's playing?
What's next?
What's the duration of this song / playlist?
What's the Bedroom player status?

Add this track to my 'Fitness' playlist
Bookmark this track
Blacklist this song
Clear the playlist

What sync groups exist?
Follow me to the Lounge
Transfer playback from Livingroom to Study
Transpose Bedroom and Bathroom
Synchronize the Bedroom, Bathroom, Office and Nursery players
Synchronize everything
Add the Guestroom player to the group
Remove Library player from the group
Ungroup my players

List my favorites
List level 2 favorites
List the favorites in folder 'Podcasts'

Sleep the Bedroom player in 8 mins 30 seconds
Sleep this player after the current song
Cancel sleep mode for the Livingroom player

Tee Up the album 'Erotica' by Madonna
Append 'Solsbury Hill' by Peter Gabriel
Add 'Mr. Blue Sky' by ELO to now-playing
Insert 'Cradle of Love' from the album 'Charmed Life'
Append 'High Hopes' from the album 'The Division Bell'
Add 'Legs' from the album Eliminator

List the songs on the album 'Rumors' by Fleetwood Mac
List albums with the song 'Roxanne' by the Police
List my new albums
Search my new albums for ZZ Top
Do I have the album 'Giants' by Chicane?
Do I have the compilation album '101 Driving Songs'?
What Paul Young albums do I have?
What Sheryl Crow singles do I have?
What genres do I have?
What playlists do I have?

Commence playback / Resume playback.
Pause.
Stop Playback
Skip / Next Track.
Previous Track
Goto track 12
Skip ahead 2 minutes.
Skip back 44 seconds
Seek directly to 17 minutes and 12 seconds

Set the volume to 60
Increase the volume by 10
Decrease the volume by 25
Mute the Livingroom player.
Unmute the Kitchen

Turn On the Library player.
Power Off Bedroom
Power Down everything

Turn On shuffle
Shuffle again
Enable shuffle-by-album on the Kitchen player
Enable shuffle-by-song for the Bedroom player
Deactivate shuffle
Enable / Disable Repeat
Turn On repeat-playlist mode
Enable repeat-song mode
Deactivate repeat for the Basement player

What alarms do I have on the bedroom player?
Enable my 7 AM alarm
Cancel my 7:30 AM alarm
Change my 7 AM alarm to 8:30 AM

Discover my players
List my players
Assume the Livingroom player
I'm within earshot of Diningroom
Rename Touch player to Bedroom player
Enable / disable artwork display
What's new?

Your Online Music Library from LMS 8.x is fully supported and e.g. Spotify playlists or Albums (present in 'your' library) can all be requested by voice, either with or without "Spotify: ..." in the utterance.

Subscription: Certain of the above commands require a monthly subscription which is handled as an ISP (In-Skill Purchase) by Alexa and costs $2.99/£2.99 per month (to cover AWS hosting fees). A 7-day trial is free for first-time subscribers. All subscriptions can be cancelled at any time by voice (there's no minimum contract). Say "Alexa, tell Media Server I want full access" and follow the spoken instructions. You will need to have enabled voice purchasing in the Alexa App (ask "Alexa, how do I enable voice purchasing?").

Help on the easy-setup procedure, plus an exhaustive A-Z phraseology reference, can be found at https://mediaserver.smartskills.tech/faq

[Apesbrain]

Very cool! But I need it for Google Home.

[Paul Webster]

Interesting approach.
The https section at https://smartskills.tech/mediaserver/#tab2 does a good job of describing things.
It does mean that no LMS addon is required to be added into the local LMS.
Will be interesting to see how many people go through the steps.

[mherger]

But doesn't this require to expose your LMS to the internet? Don't be
soothed by the use of https: if there's no password protection
whatsoever, then I and John Doe would be able to control your players,
too. https only protects the transfer from your door to the recipient (or
the other way around), but not the door itself.

Which brings us back to this:
https://forums.slimdevices.com/showt...o-the-internet!

--

Michael

[philchillbill]

Yes Michael, but a reverse proxy or ssl tunnel DOES implement password protection. It’s certainly not the same as exposing your LMS directly to the outside. The online docs for the skill explain this very clearly.


Note: As of Feb 2021 there's a completely automated installation procedure for the ngrok proxy - see the announcement at https://forums.slimdevices.com/showt...e-Alexa-skills

[slartibartfast]

Yes Michael, but a reverse proxy or ssl tunnel DOES implement password protection. It’s certainly not the same as exposing your LMS directly to the outside. The online docs for the skill explain this very clearly.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Is there a username/password in the Serveo set up? The instructions say to leave them blank.

Sent from my SM-G900F using Tapatalk

[d6jg]

This looks very interesting. The serveo tunnel setup is from the local end so I presume no port opening is required?

[philchillbill]

Is there a username/password in the Serveo set up? The instructions say to leave them blank.

Serveo has the option to use SSH public key authentication (PKA) but that involves public/private rsa keys which are not a traditional username and password and explains why they are to be left blank. Their site explains PKA. You can use serveo without PKA to create an unsecured tunnel, and combine it with apache to reverse-proxy towards your LMS machine with basic auth enforced. More involved but very secure. At least there's no need then to get an SSL cert and DDNS name and open ports. If you did things that way, the server path to fill in would still be serveo but you WOULD then fill in the username and password that you configured for the secondary apache.

However, ngrok is by far the easiest option and it's very secure.

[d6jg]

Serveo has the option to use SSH public key authentication (PKA) but that involves public/private rsa keys which are not a traditional username and password and explains why they are to be left blank. Their site explains PKA. You can use serveo without PKA to create an unsecured tunnel, and combine it with apache to reverse-proxy towards your LMS machine with basic auth enforced. More involved but very secure. At least there's no need then to get an SSL cert and DDNS name and open ports. If you did things that way, the server path to fill in would still be serveo but you WOULD then fill in the username and password that you configured for the secondary apache.

However, ngrok is by far the easiest option and it's very secure.

My router - Draytek Vigor - supports SSL Web Proxy with user/pass.
Https://mypublicipaddress:443 proxies to http://lmsip:9000
Presumably this would also work?

[mherger]

> Serveo has the option to use SSH public key authentication but that
> involves public/private rsa keys which are not a traditional username
> and password and explains why they are to be left blank.

It's my understanding that this is not being used to protect access to
the host, but the connection when using a custom domain of yours.

IMHO ngrok is kind of a cloud based reverse proxy with additional
features, whereas serveo is much simpler, but mostly a port forwarding
service. No added http features besides the https wrapper. But your LMS
would be as exposed to the internet as if you did forward the port on
your router.

--

Michael