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

[philchillbill]

@staresy noticed a while ago that FollowMe/Transfer didn't work properly on Windows 10 and I noticed myself that it needed a tweak for pCP or it failed totally. Apparently, the method of saving a temporary playlist to the filesystem and resuming it is not foolproof on every OS. Looking in the source of Material, I noticed @cpd73 took a different (clever!) approach for his TransferQueue function - namely briefly sync the source/target players and then unsync them and kill off the source.

I've now implemented this for MediaServer and it seems to work much more fluidly, while also not leaving temporary files in the playlists folder. Another advantage is that if the target player was in a sync group, the playlist is now transferred to all of the players in that group, which was not the case before.

[FredFredrickson]

Just wanted to let you know you've got a paid subscriber from me. I hope my meager contribution helps keep this project alive. LMS for ever!

[philchillbill]

Just wanted to let you know you've got a paid subscriber from me. I hope my meager contribution helps keep this project alive. LMS for ever!

Great to hear - thanks. You had the good fortune of the new easy-setup being available instead of having to create files manually like the pioneers here on the forums.

As it's new , there has not been so much feedback on it. Was there any step that you struggled with?

[FredFredrickson]

Great to hear - thanks. You had the good fortune of the new easy-setup being available instead of having to create files manually like the pioneers here on the forums.

As it's new , there has not been so much feedback on it. Was there any step that you struggled with?

Probably nothing you can control but I set it up on an Echo Show 5 and Alexa's voice recognition on that thing is atrocious, so getting her to follow commands wasn't easy and I had to repeat multiple times.

But aside from that it was relatively painless. Configuring ngrok with your tool was fine, however if I had to choose I'd put all the steps for enabling the skill + ngrok in one place. As it stood I had to follow multiple links on the forum to figure it out.

Now as for WAF- convincing her to say "tell mediaserver to " in front of the commands where she's used to saying "play song" is going to be tricky.

But all in all, I am still happier with LMS multi-room audio over echo sync (which is garbage .. WHEN/IF it works).

[philchillbill]

Configuring ngrok with your tool was fine, however if I had to choose I'd put all the steps for enabling the skill + ngrok in one place.

Now as for WAF- convincing her to say "tell mediaserver to " in front of the commands where she's used to saying "play song" is going to be tricky.

I'm actually working on what Amazon calls app-to-app linking so that the whole setup can be done with a single click from my website. It's not ready for prime time yet though.

It's such a shame that custom skills need the invocation name. If you can set a default music service like Amazon Music or Spotify for "play song" then why not a default SKILL for "play song"? There is https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/d...om-skills.html but it's awfully hit-and-miss with music skills because Alexa herself is trigger-happy to play music for you on the Echo.

Anyway, appreciate the feedback.

[gegen]

Great to hear - thanks. You had the good fortune of the new easy-setup being available instead of having to create files manually like the pioneers here on the forums.

As it's new , there has not been so much feedback on it. Was there any step that you struggled with?

Another subscriber easy setup worked well, no problems at all on my piCoreplayer setup.

One question, after a reboot the ngrok tunnel needs to be reinstated with 'sh ngrok_startup.sh' ....which works fine, is it possible to automate this?

Perhaps a command in the 'User Commands' section of the pCP Tweaks page?

[philchillbill]

One question, after a reboot the ngrok tunnel needs to be reinstated with 'sh ngrok_startup.sh' ....which works fine, is it possible to automate this?

Perhaps a command in the 'User Commands' section of the pCP Tweaks page?

It is already automated - as the docs state: 'An entry in /opt/bootlocal.sh ensures ngrok_startup.sh runs at system boot to continually refresh your tunnel details when you reboot.' This was done so you don't have to 'waste' a user-command on ngrok.

The reason for the single manual run after initial setup is so that the user can see the tunnel URL mentioned when that script runs so as to use it during account-linking. By the time you run it manually, it has already run anyway but you missed its output which is normally irrelevant but needed when linking. Rather than telling you to run once manually, the docs could instead tell you to visit the :4040 web-page after rebooting the pi as the URL is mentioned there too.

Thanks to @chill, the script will soon do everything in a single pass without reboot, but it's not yet ready to go live as I also need to change some stuff in the cloud to handle an incoming URL potentially before the skill was linked.

It will all get even easier very soon

[gegen]

It is already automated - as the docs state: 'An entry in /opt/bootlocal.sh ensures ngrok_startup.sh runs at system boot to continually refresh your tunnel details when you reboot.' This was done so you don't have to 'waste' a user-command on ngrok.

The reason for the single manual run after initial setup is so that the user can see the tunnel URL mentioned when that script runs so as to use it during account-linking. By the time you run it manually, it has already run anyway but you missed its output which is normally irrelevant but needed when linking. Rather than telling you to run once manually, the docs could instead tell you to visit the :4040 web-page after rebooting the pi as the URL is mentioned there too.

Thanks to @chill, the script will soon do everything in a single pass without reboot, but it's not yet ready to go live as I also need to change some stuff in the cloud to handle an incoming URL potentially before the skill was linked.

It will all get even easier very soon

Thanks for the explanation.

[philchillbill]

Thanks for the explanation.

No problem. The simpler one-pass process is now live so no reboot required - ngrok is immediately available after running setup.sh.

[gegen]

No problem. The simpler one-pass process is now live so no reboot required - ngrok is immediately available after running setup.sh.

Sorry if I'm taking a while to fully understand everything

If I wanted to have the ngrok tunnel persist with no url changes after a reboot...I would have to have a paid plan with ngrok, is that right?