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

[philchillbill]

Note: this intro post is always up-to-date

There's a new certified Alexa skill to control LMS in the Amazon skills store. It's called MediaServer and you can find it 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. MediaServer is multimodal, meaning it embraces both voice and touchscreen inputs.

A downloadable installer automatically sets up the required password-protected https proxy to your LMS instance. Available for pCP, Linux, macOS and Windows, it's not an LMS plugin as such but instead deploys (free) ngrok to tunnel to LMS using TCP over SSH — very secure!. There is no port-opening in your router with this approach.

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 in the en-US, en-CA and en-GB locales (covers whole EU). Altogether, it supports 129 intents, of which 94 are in the free-to-use class.

Cover art and/or textual metadata are displayed on your Echo's screen (if present) for all commands.





In addition to controlling all your players by name, the skill can 'stream' LMS audio over WiFi to your Echos as audio-sink. New: Stream commands no longer require a subscription. You can now use your Echo as LMS audio-sink for free!

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

Play the album 'Phaedra'
Play the album 'Ghost Stories' by Coldplay
Play the compilation 'American Road Trip'
Play the single 'Sunny Days' by Armin van Buuren
Play the song 'Dancing in the Dark'
Play the song 'Chasing Cars' by Snow Patrol
Play early Aretha Franklin
Play recent David Gilmour
Play songs from 1978
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 'Musique' by Daft Punk

^*Using 'Stream" instead of 'Play' in the above commands will direct the LMS audio to your Echo itself instead of a Squeezebox player.

What's playing on 'Touch'?
What's up next on 'Transporter'?
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

Follow me to the 'Lounge'
Transfer playback from 'Livingroom' to 'Study'
Transpose 'Bedroom' and 'Bathroom' players

What sync groups exist?
Synchronize the 'Bedroom', 'Bathroom', 'Office' and 'Nursery' players
Synchronize everything
Include the 'Guestroom' player in 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
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
What albums contain 'Roxanne' by the Police?
List my new albums
Search new items for ZZ Top
Do I have 'Giants' by Chicane?
Do I have '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?

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 'piCorePlayer5'

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

Activate 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 MediaServer works with libraries on Spotify, Deezer, Tidal and Qobuz.

Some of the above commands require having a paid subscription which is handled as an ISP (In-Skill Purchase) by Alexa. It costs $2.99/£2.99/CAD3.79 per month and serves to cover AWS hosting fees and offset ISP charges for the back-end.

A 7-day trial is free for first-time subscribers.

Say "Alexa, tell Media Server I want a subscription" 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?").
Note that subscriptions can be cancelled at any time by voice as there's no minimum contract.

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

Finally, there's a video demonstrating some of the more common commands:

[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