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

[philchillbill]

Im trying to control LMS on my Mac mini with Amazon fire tablet with alexa. Ive menage to installed everything but alexa on tablet cant discover any playeri ( i have touch and classic). I tought maybe its because my mac mini dont have any microphone? Maybe something to install on touch? Or something else. Ill preciate any suggestions. Thnx!

The Mac mini does not need the Mic - it's the Alexa device that needs it and the Fire tablet handles that. What is Alexa telling you when discovery fails?

[d6jg]

I just verified I could navigate the menu structure. Didn’t bother listening if anything played. I’ll check tomorrow.


Edit: It does play. But the Deezer account I'm logged in to is not mine and I don't see a playlist structure - just genre categories. No idea if that's normal or just the way my former housemate set up his account. When I select the Alexa Player in Material and open the Apps view, only Spotty shows so indeed Alexa is not a valid/recognised player for Deezer. Therefore indeed no streaming to Echo, although voice control for playback on a proper Squeezebox would work.

I agree. This means that the Alexa as a player with stream.mp3 won't support Tidal or Deezer (or other mySB.com apps) but will work with Spotty and Quboz as they are LMS based. It will as you say control a proper Squeezebox and Pi based players etc and I suspect also Philippe's bridges with Deezer and Tidal.

[philchillbill]

Spotty support is improving greatly!

The command "Play my Christmas Songs playlist" (e.g.) will now first look in your regular LMS playlists for something called Christmas Songs. If there's no match, instead of just barfing it will search your Spotty playlists and look for it there. If found, it will play and the spoken response will indicate that the match occurred against Spotty. If not found there either, only then do we barf. If you have both a regular LMS playlist and a Spotty one with the same (fuzzy) name, the LMS one is preferred.

If she says "I don't see a Christmas Songs playlist" then the skill didn't even invoke and Alexa tried to handle the command 'herself' (the lack of '...in your library' is the clue to this). Remember, she can be trigger-happy when it comes to playing music.

It also works for the Stream variant of the command.

The utterance variations are:

"load {Playlist}",
"load my playlist {Playlist}",
"load my {Playlist} playlist",
"load the playlist {Playlist}",
"load the {Playlist} playlist",

"play my playlist {Playlist}",
"play my {Playlist} playlist",
"play the playlist {Playlist}",
"play the {Playlist} playlist"

Dedicated Spotty utterances will be added at the next certification cycle. That can include asking for Podcasts by name if people want that...

Regarding Spotty playlists and podcasts, I've made it possible to deliberately target them and skip over your regular LMS playlists in the search if you want. That's slightly faster if you know you want Spotty anyway and also avoids issues of what to do when both lists have overlapping entries.

Just end the load command with '(on|from|via|using) (spotty|spotify)', or in the case of podcasts, with 'podcast' as the last word. Not doing either will just search through all 3 categories and play the first found match.

Examples:

Load my 'Spinning' playlist <-- will check all 3 categories (LMS, spotty playlists, spotty podcasts)
Load 'Morning Grooves' using Spotty <-- will only check among your Spotty playlists and not your LMS playlists or your Spotty podcasts
Load 'Workout' playlist via Spotty on the bedroom player <-- will only check among your Spotty playlists and not your LMS playlists or your Spotty podcasts
Load 'The Joe Rogan Experience' podcast <-- only searches your Spotty podcasts

Note that this whole feature is using AMAZON.SearchQuery as the slot type to match against (that's the only way to combine diverse 'things' like playlist names and plugin names and player names in one utterance). That will make it flakier as the text after the initial 'load' word lengthens. In other words, 'Load spinning' would work 100% of the time, but "Load Grandma's favorite knitting songs playlist using Spotty on the Upstairs Black Transporter player" might be stretching your luck somewhat

[tushma]

The Mac mini does not need the Mic - it's the Alexa device that needs it and the Fire tablet handles that. What is Alexa telling you when discovery fails?

It says to check on alexa skils settings. Contact developer or something. Nothing special.

[philchillbill]

It says to check on alexa skils settings. Contact developer or something. Nothing special.

The only failed discovery messages I see in the log are from somebody who linked the skill with ngrok (validly) but then killed the ngrok tunnel so that they would need to redo account linking with a new/valid tunnel (and not kill that one !). Might that be you?

[tushma]

The only failed discovery messages I see in the log are from somebody who linked the skill with ngrok (validly) but then killed the ngrok tunnel so that they would need to redo account linking with a new/valid tunnel (and not kill that one !). Might that be you?

Hahaha. Yes. Very probably its me. Its says something about this tunnels. Ill try to restore account and add new vald tunnel. Thnx!

[tushma]

Hahaha. Yes. Very probably its me. Its says something about this tunnels. Ill try to restore account and add new vald tunnel. Thnx!

Still nothing. It says : POST /jsonrpc.js 502 Bad Gateway

[philchillbill]

Have you tried using your ngrok tunnel url from a browser? It’s very likely failing there too. Maybe the error message there will be clearer. Do you have something other than a Mac to try it out? It sounds like ngrok cannot communicate with LMS, meaning the skill won't be able to either.

[castalla]

Would it be possible to add a command(s) to adjust the equaliser settings?

[philchillbill]

Would it be possible to add a command(s) to adjust the equaliser settings?

For sure. However, the docs state that bass/treble setting ".. is only supported by SliMP3 and SqueezeBox (SB1) players." So I took it off my list of original features for that reason.