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

[philchillbill]

There's a new full-function 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. During skill account-linking, you fill in an externally-accessible password-protected https path to your LMS server (ngrok is recommended for this) and that's it. It has been extensively tested on a library with 70K+ songs and supports a natural, conversational interaction style. How well it will work for you will, of course, 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 116 command categories, of which 72 are in the free-to-use class.

The skill can direct LMS audio over WiFi to your Echo device as audio-sink. On Echos with screens, touchscreen controls become available. Any transcoding of formats not supported natively by the Echo is handled automatically by LMS.

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 Deep House
Play my Supperclub 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

*Using 'Stream" instead of 'Play' in the above commands will direct the LMS audio to your Echo device instead of a Squeezebox 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 my favorites
List level 2 favorites
List the favorites in folder 'Podcasts'
List the songs on the album Rumors by Fleetwood Mac
List albums with the song Roxanne by the Police
List my new albums
Search new albums for ZZ Top
Add this track to my Fitness playlist
Bookmark this track
Blacklist this song
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?
What sync groups exist?
Follow me to the Lounge
Transfer playback from Livingroom to Study
Synchronize the Bedroom, Bathroom, Office and Nursery players
Add the Guestroom player to the group
Remove Library player from the group
Unsynchronize my players
Sleep the Bedroom player in 8 mins 30 seconds
Sleep this player after the current song
Cancel sleep mode for the Livingroom player
What's playing?
What's next?
What's the duration of this song / playlist?
What's the Bedroom player status?
Discover my players
What players do I have?
Assume the Livingroom player
I'm within earshot of Diningroom
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
Rename Touch player to Bedroom player
Clear the playlist
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

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

Each Echo can be associated with a default Squeezebox ('assume') so as to allow subsequent player-name omission in utterances. Echos in open-plan spaces can be designated as being within earshot of each other to avoid confusion around what player is thus targeted. Finally, you can ask the skill to provide longer or shorter spoken responses/confirmations.

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, and 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").

Extensive help with (ngrok) setup, plus an exhaustive command reference detailing all the ways commands can be spoken, can be found at https://mediaserver.smartskills.tech/faq

You are strongly recommended to read the section regarding player names at https://mediaserver.smartskills.tech...ml#section-1-3

[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.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[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