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[sarkonovich]

@datadude,

It has nothing to do with my end. I've heard complaints before on the developer's forum that the echo can start getting bad at recognizing it's wake word, and a power cycle on the device helps.

But, I can't explain this. (Also, Amazon is constantly tinkering with the voice-recognition model, so recognition might change without me doing anything.)

I haven't touched the code in quite a while....

[datdude]

Ok. No worries, it's working perfectly now!

[brantome]

The real difficulty with this is that for audio streaming directly to an Alexa device, the audio file must be hosted on an HTTPS site, and be (I think) publicly accessible. So, you'd need to be able to access the file with a simple call like:

https://my-audio-hosting-site.com/audio/sample-song.mp3

Obviously, JRiver doesn't make your files accessible like that. I don't know what would be required to write a skill that would stream your own music library directly to Alexa, but I suspect it would not be easy. And it wouldn't be a skill that was publishable - it would have to just be  a private skill.

Steve

Hi, have you seen this? Seems to play media directly to your Echo from local files/ iTunes library...
https://www.mymediaalexa.com/

Cheers

[Vissian]

Just reporting two issues (not sure if they've already been mentioned), regarding playing TV shows, but possibly in all formats since it appears to be a query issue.

1) The queries don't like leading zeroes.
2) If a number is in the show, it the query uses a numeral instead of text and fails.

In the case of a show like 'One Piece', there are 19 seasons and close to 800 episodes (and growing). I tend to keep the tags of the show like:
Series = One Piece
Season = 01,02,03...19
Episode = 001,002,003...800
Title = "text"

As an example, when I have "Alexa, ask House Band to play episode forty seven season one of One Piece", the search string is:
[episode]=[47" [media sub type]=[tv show] [series]=[1 piece" [season]=[1"

This fails because the episode is numbered 047 and the season is 01 and the series is One Piece.
When I remove the leading zeroes (tested with a different show because of the 1 vs One issue), it does work properly.

[sarkonovich]

@Vissian

Thanks. I'll take a look.

Steve

[sarkonovich]

@brantome

Thanks! I'll take a look! 

Steve

[William-NM]

Steve / brantome
It sure does seem possible to play local tunes to any nearby Alexa device via the 'My Media' skill. I tried it from several different rooms with echos or dots in them and it played to that room without any difficulty (or configuration). I just installed My Media last night. It took over 12 hours to index 110K files, but it got through them and mostly works as advertised - It IS nice to be in any room with an echo and just say 'Alexa, ask My Media to play some Tom Petty'. It works well for albums & genres as well.

Unfortunately, it fails when asked for a particular song and only does itunes playlists, so pretty limited functionality. They did get the 'hard' part working well, though, so I'm hopeful that House Band might eventually learn this trick...
Steve - you should really put a "tip jar" up so we can encourage you 
Wm.

[sarkonovich]

William-NM / Brantome

I downloaded it and it does work well! Maybe I'll poke around and see if there is an easy way to use MC to do the same thing.

Steve

[datdude]

Feature request.

I'd love it if you could queue up a "connected media" website via voice. I've loaded in several pandora stations each as their own option in the connected media tree.

[jober]

Looks good!
Is there a plan to translate it to German?
I use the German skill store and house band is not available there.

[DougTelf]

I have two Echo dots. I have downloaded JRiver Media Centre to my PC and it looks great. I only want it for mp3 files. I have downloaded the My Media Center onto my PC. I have set up the House Band and the My Media skills on the Alexa skills page. What I need now is how to get Alexa to select the music and play it on the Dot and not my PC. Can someone please help me.

[Moe]

I have two Echo dots. I have downloaded JRiver Media Centre to my PC and it looks great. I only want it for mp3 files. I have downloaded the My Media Center onto my PC. I have set up the House Band and the My Media skills on the Alexa skills page. What I need now is how to get Alexa to select the music and play it on the Dot and not my PC. Can someone please help me.

That is not what House Band was designed to do.  It is designed to play the media from your PC not to stream to your Dots.

[DougTelf]

Thanks Moe, that has cleared up one issue. Can I use the My Media skill to play JRiver Media Center on my Echo Dot. If so can you please give me some guidance on how to set it up. I have activated the My Media skill on Alexa and have downloaded My Media on to my PC. The My Media on my PC appears to be doing a similar job to JRiver Media Centre but it does not appear to let me set up my own meta tags for the files. It looks as if JRiver would be better for my project if I can get it to play on my Echo Dot.

[Moe]

Sorry, I have no experience with the My Media skill.

[Moe]

Do you think you'll ever add integration with Amazon Echo Show?  I would LOVE to be able to display album art, artist, song, album, etc. on the Show while listening to music.

[sarkonovich]

Moe,

Yes, I think I will. I've updated some other skills for the show, so I HouseBand will happen.

What I'd really like to do is use the Show's touch screen to select from a list when there are multiple results, change zones, etc.

Steve

[Moe]

Sounds great!

[Pinkie2]

Is there a plan to translate it to German?
I use the German skill store and house band is not available there.

A German translation would be appreciated. I saw the release was planned for after summer.
I'm sure everyone here would be happy to help.

[sarkonovich]

I'm sorry....I was optimistic.

I am currently involved in a German release for another skill of mine (Big Sky - try it! You'll like it!). And it's a lot of work, all my fault, because I didn't write it with localization in mind. However, I am going to take what I learn from that and try to get to HouseBand.

[elsalvador99]

Hi Guys,

I must say I was very chuffed to find out that my JRiver media centre could work with my Amazon Dot.
Clearly you've done a lot of hard work to get it working, I take my hat off to you, sir(s).

One tiny question on the "link account" mechanism:
I'm not awfully keen on opening ports on my firewall, especially when both the Dot and the MC are on the same LAN, and my ISP insists on changing my outside IP Address on a regular basis. So there's a security issue and a performance one if the music has to go through the firewall & router & then back in again (even if that would work, which I doubt).
Can't it find it on the local LAN? / Is that port forwarding a permanent setting? / Does it stop working every time BT change my IP Address?
Oops that's three Q's - sorry ;-)

Thanks in advance.

[sarkonovich]

Hello @elsalvador99

Unfortunately, you do need to open the port to access your Media Center from outside your network. Though both the Dot and JR MC are on the same network, the HouseBand skill is not. It's hosted in the cloud, so it needs a way to get information to/from the dot.

However, you will not lose access every time your ISP changes your IP address. The 6-letter access code is used to locate your personal Media Server. As long as the relevant port is open, you don't have to worry about the WAN IP address.

However, if you password protect your server, then HouseBand uses an  authentication token used to gain access to your server. That token eventually expires (though I don't know after how long.) In that case, you do have to re-link HouseBand to Media Center so it can get the new access token.

Thanks for the kind words about HouseBand!
Steve

[elsalvador99]

Hi Steve,

Ooh, that's really interesting.
Let me explore some of those details...
Dot can find houseband easily, regardless of outside IP Addr, but Houseband has to connect to JriverMC, so needs the ports forwarded.
ISP changes the IP Address, so the source IP of the Dot probably tells Houseband the new IP & therefore HB knows where to go back to...is that correct?

Is/are there a (number of?) hostnames for the houseband cloud servers so I can put some semblence of protection on my firewall?
ie "allow port forwarding but only from these source addresses/network"?
I'm pretty nervous about blanket port forwarding for anyone since the Synology cloud storage "security updates" (to stop ransomware breeches apparently).
My firewall's constantly being port scanned, so something is always waiting to try to take advantage. Even if it's not able to break in, it's still hitting my PC.

Thanks - really interesting stuff.
SDD

[elsalvador99]

Hi Steve,

Did some experimenting (packet captures etc).
Success! Looks like it's worked.
The firewall rule was quite obvious, silly me!
For reference:
source address = sarkonovich-2.elasticbeanstalk.com
source port = any
dest port = tcp-52199
dest IP = <your-jriver-mc>
That's (almost) as secure as it can be, but it's way good enough for 99.9% of peeps.

I was surprised that the MC played the album, rather than the dot - as I'd expected, but it's an excellent start!
Thanks for all the efforts, much appreciated.

[sarkonovich]

I'm glad that's all figured out!

Note, though, that if you limit the source address to just the one associated with HouseBand, you won't be able to use Gizmo or the other JRiver apps remotely. (For example, I use JRiver Gizmo to stream my music to my phone when I'm driving.)

Steve

[Paul Sheridan]

Hi I have the House Bound skill up and running since the start and it seems to be getting better with Alexa. But trying to get JRiver Gizmo to work outside my network is proving to be more problematic. I have opened a port on my router for houseband 51299 gizmo works perfectly in my own network but when I switch off wifi on my phone and enable 4g on my phone it says  error communicating with server.  I have tried all that JRiver has laid out about networking on their wiki. Cant seem to get beyond this. I  would love to be able to use this in my car any ideas?.

[wellivea1]

I'm not sure why, but the House Band skill is not working for me. It shows it playing on the server side, but is completely silent on the echo. Maybe it needs certain settings for the dlna streaming to work?

[JimH]

I don't think it will play on the Echo.  It controls MC.

[wellivea1]

I don't think it will play on the Echo.  It controls MC.

Oh, that's disappointing. I thought it played on the echo, especially since nothing came out of my speakers when it started playing (maybe my headphones were plugged in).

[Reckit]

Hi Steve

Not sure whether or not it has been covered in this thread, but I'm having trouble getting the music to play through different zones using voice commands. If I ask Alexa what my zones are she tells me no problem. If I then ask her to change zone she says she cant find any of my zones. The only way I can get my music to play in a specific zone is to select it in JRiver on the PC then ask houseband to play music. Only then will the music play through that zone

[JimH]

Try the Zoneswitch topic on our wiki.  It may be useful.

[Reckit]

ok thanks, I'll have a look

[riverdragon]

Thanks for this skill, a real treat.
Question: what would be the fastest way to "Play (shuffled)" a specific view or the entire library?

[Moe]

Sarkonovich, I was just wondering if you've started doing anything with the Echo Show.  I've got a Show now and would so love for House Band to display cover art and other stuff.

House Band is easily my most used skill on my Echo.

Cheers

[rn701]

Love this skill. Nice work.

Any plans for a Google Home version?

(Sorry if already asked.)

[sarkonovich]

ok thanks, I'll have a look

@Reckit,

Sorry, I've been off these boards for awhile. If you're still having trouble with switching zones, send me an email at sarkonovich at gmail dot com

[sarkonovich]

Love this skill. Nice work.

Any plans for a Google Home version?

(Sorry if already asked.)

A while back I started work on it....and got pretty far. But really, in the limited time I have to spend on this (which has been no time lately), I will continue to work on Alexa.

[sarkonovich]

Sarkonovich, I was just wondering if you've started doing anything with the Echo Show.  I've got a Show now and would so love for House Band to display cover art and other stuff.

House Band is easily my most used skill on my Echo.

Cheers

@Moe,

Well, Show support is on high on the list, once I get the time to dive back in.
Cover art, select by touch, etc.

First, though, is support for https.
Second, figure out if https support can be leveraged into playing through an Echo device.
Third, better recognition...etc.

[rn701]

A while back I started work on it....and got pretty far. But really, in the limited time I have to spend on this (which has been no time lately), I will continue to work on Alexa.

I hear you.  Have an amusing workaround for playlists. I set up a google home shortcut named [playlist name] with the action "repeat after me alexa tell house band to shuffle playlist [playlist name]"

Works like a champ. Thanks again for the awesome House Band skill. Nice work.

[markopolo12]

Does House Band work with older versions of MC (20.113)?  Or, do you need to have a newer version?

[sarkonovich]

Does House Band work with older versions of MC (20.113)?  Or, do you need to have a newer version?

Hello! I read some of the background you left on the other thread. Do you have multiple profiles for the Echo device? This sounds like an issue where it is linked in the app with one profile, but the device is using another.

It should work fine with older versions, I'd think.

[markopolo12]

My wife has a profile.  I installed the echo app on my phone (as well).  The House Band app is on my phone (and not on her app).  It is "her" Echo (in so much that she has to approve users, etc.).  It appears to be letting me in, links, says success, and then repeats (the server is running fine w/ gizmo, etc.). 

Are you saying she needs to install it on her end?

[sarkonovich]

My wife has a profile.  I installed the echo app on my phone (as well).  The House Band app is on my phone (and not on her app).  It is "her" Echo (in so much that she has to approve users, etc.).  It appears to be letting me in, links, says success, and then repeats (the server is running fine w/ gizmo, etc.). 

Are you saying she needs to install it on her end?

You can check if you have multiple profiles by saying to the device, "Alexa, switch profiles." If you only have one, she'll say: "this device has only one registered account."

The app you are using for account linking needs to be logged into the same Amazon account that is associated with the (active profile) of the Alexa device. If you and your wife have separate Amazon accounts, that could be the problem.

The idea is that different people can use the same device, and have different skills enabled, different options, etc. Alexa is now smart enough to figure out who is talking. So, if you say, "what's my flash briefing" and another user (with a different profile) says the same thing, you will each get the custom flash briefing that you set up.

[robt]

I'm getting really excited about this, so much so that I've bought a Harmony Hub so that Alexa can switch everything on and off for me and that's all working brilliantly.

I've installed the Harmony and the House Band skill, all I need now is an Echo which are completely sold out in the Uk!

Not available until Jan 8th. They must've sold like the proverbial hot cakes here for Christmas. Must be one of the best gifts ever for £35.....

[chstuart]

Sarkonovich,

I have read this thread from beginning to end in an effort to get up to speed with your development of the House Band skill for Alexa. My hat is off to you. Very impressive!

I just received an Echo Dot and have only scratched the surface of its abilities. I want to put a Dot in each room in my home and use the Dots for home automation for lights, HVAC, security system and whatever else I can automate with the Dot.

I have been using MC18 for whole house audio for years on a single Zone throughout my home. I have been using Gizmo or Bubble to control the music via my Android phone or tablet and I have volume controls in each room to control the volume. I am really trying to wrap my head around how I can use the Dot to control music playback through MC18 and the whole house audio system. One Zone throughout the house is somewhat easy to figure out, but I want a Zone for each Dot in each room. How do we do this?

Alexa uses Groups as I am sure you are aware to do this for music that is streamed through the Dot. Is there a way to link MC18 Zones with Alexa Groups? I know the people on the JRiver forum community have thrown a lot of requests for features at you and you have been very gracious in trying to be accommodating. I would like to pick your brain to figure out how to marry JRiver MC and Alexa as a multi-zone whole house audio solution.

What are your thoughts?

[sarkonovich]

Alexa uses Groups as I am sure you are aware to do this for music that is streamed through the Dot. Is there a way to link MC18 Zones with Alexa Groups?

I don't think there is any way to link MC zones to groups. (Maybe if you had those new Sonos + Alexa speakers....?) No Amazon Alexa devices can be used as a zone, since they are not DLNA devices.

The only way to get HouseBand to play through an Amazon Alexa device is to connect the device via bluetooth (e.g., if you are using MC to play music through your computer, or phone, you could then connect your phone to the Echo via bluetooth.)

That's my understanding, but there might be some creative way that I'm over looking...

Steve

[yosemvr]

Thank you Steve for this wonderful skill. I have been using House Band for a almost a week and here are some facts, issues and suggestions (in the spirit of community assistance and cooperation). Happy New Year!

Facts:

1 - My high res music collection is comprised of about 2,500 albums (26,000 songs), all properly indexed in MediaMonkey, Pioneer VSX-830 receiver, generic (XGODY) streamer with Kodi.
2 - In a vast majority of the cases House Band responds correctly and is a joy to use (as is JR MC), the more I use it the better I can get it to recognise my commands correctly and achieve positive results.
3 - Port forwarding was a bit of a struggle probably due to my outdated cable router that is not delivering the goods, placing my MC PC in the DMZ solved the problem for now (don't flame me, I have a strong firewall and as I said it is temporary).
4 - I am still figuring out how to successfully migrate my MediaMonkey library to MC, in the meantime I launch MM and load its library into MC, this works well.
5 - Kodi integration is as easy as setting up Kodi for UPNP remote control and then it appears as a player/zone in MC.

Issues:

1 - House Band would not recognize my Kodi zone until I changed the name to lowercase kodi.
2 - If I speak in a relaxed manner when requesting a zone change then for a vast majority of the cases it will not respond. If I speak quickly then for a vast majority of the cases it will respond correctly.
3 - In general it seems like House Band is a bit impatient compared to other skills I use, in House Band I always feel compelled to speak fast and fluently in order to get good results. One would think that the recognition would be better if you speak slower and with the correct articulation, but it looks like the opposite for now.
4 - Both the receiver and Kodi do not support the usage of both House Band and manual DLNA control in the same session (as is the case with Gizmo). Many times it would be more comfortable to be able to use both of them freely. For me this is important because my receiver does not support gapless DLNA push, I would like to pull gapless albums with my remote and play them gapless (like Sgt. Pepper), but using one method cancels out the other.
5 - Leading album-side and track numbers in song names is a huge issue (A2 With a little help from my friends, B1 Within you without you), for these cases it will not recognize the song names at all. A fuzzy keyword or track name search is required, if I request "the track Within you without you by the artist the Beatles" then it should recognise that most of the result qualifies the song as meeting the criteria (I would prefer getting multiple results then no result at all).
6 - The fuzzy search is also good for other cases, like when I request "play the album baby by the artist yello", I get no results because the band yello is not spelled like the color, again a search like this should result in the correct action.
7 - Pausing video playback requires the command "stop the music", not that bad but a bit weird.

Suggestions:

1 - If possible help solve the gapless push issue (receivers that can not play gapless between tracks from a DLNA push). For myself and others this is a major setback (actually considering replacing my receiver). Maybe JR can help work around this by allowing for an unused tag to be filled with the text "gapless" in order to indicate this kind of required playback. Then when an album is requested that has this tag they can fool the DLNA client to except one continuous gapless sequence of songs.
2 - Selecting between multiple results is difficult most of the time. I have quite a few multiple album versions and some of the names are long and beyond the actual album name (version technical info and such...). It would help a lot if the results can be numbered, like "choice one - Sgt. Pepper Blu-ray by the artist the beatles", "choice two - Sgt. Pepper vinyl by the artist the beatles", then I can say "select choice two" instead of remembering keywords and how to pronounce them like SACD, of MoFi.
3 - Ask JR to create a read only version of Gizmo, for now if you do anything with Gizmo or even launch it then it at some point it will take control and block the House Band usage. Who needs Amazon Show, with a read only Gizmo version you can dynamically see the album cover and song info using a tablet. Also sometimes you do not want to recall a song or album from your head but rather be inspired, flipping through album covers can help you find the next request (also helpful in cases where the recognition fails and you want to check out the correct wording for a song or album, or if you don't remember the exact name of a specific song on an album).
5 - Kodi does not remember where I left off while watching a TV series or episode after exiting exiting the player, not the position and not the episode. I presume MC can help and keep track of this in the background. If I want to watch episode 4 of season 4 of black mirror (my episodes are typically marked S4E4), then I need to say "play the TV show black mirror" and then "skip this song" four times (unless I am doing something wrong).
6 - Playing a single song is great, but sometimes you want to hear a song and the rest of the album from there onward, in this case I can request "play the sequence maxine by the artist donald fagen" so House Band will play the song Maxine and after that the rest of the album.

Thanks Again.

[sarkonovich]

Issues:

1 - House Band would not recognize my Kodi zone until I changed the name to lowercase kodi.
2 - If I speak in a relaxed manner when requesting a zone change then for a vast majority of the cases it will not respond. If I speak quickly then for a vast majority of the cases it will respond correctly.
3 - In general it seems like House Band is a bit impatient compared to other skills I use, in House Band I always feel compelled to speak fast and fluently in order to get good results. One would think that the recognition would be better if you speak slower and with the correct articulation, but it looks like the opposite for now.
4 - Both the receiver and Kodi do not support the usage of both House Band and manual DLNA control in the same session (as is the case with Gizmo). Many times it would be more comfortable to be able to use both of them freely. For me this is important because my receiver does not support gapless DLNA push, I would like to pull gapless albums with my remote and play them gapless (like Sgt. Pepper), but using one method cancels out the other.
5 - Leading album-side and track numbers in song names is a huge issue (A2 With a little help from my friends, B1 Within you without you), for these cases it will not recognize the song names at all. A fuzzy keyword or track name search is required, if I request "the track Within you without you by the artist the Beatles" then it should recognise that most of the result qualifies the song as meeting the criteria (I would prefer getting multiple results then no result at all).
6 - The fuzzy search is also good for other cases, like when I request "play the album baby by the artist yello", I get no results because the band yello is not spelled like the color, again a search like this should result in the correct action.
7 - Pausing video playback requires the command "stop the music", not that bad but a bit weird.

Thanks for the kind words about the skill.

Here's a few comments (almost all of them unhelpful!) about the issues you raise.

1. Zone searches are case insensitive. (For example, my zones are "Player" and "LIVING ROOM"). I'd guess that Amazon hears Kodi as Cody. But not sure why changing to lower case would change anything. I'll take a look.

2. & 3. Hmm. These are all about Amazon. I've actually found that speaking normally, at whatever speed, seems to yield the best results.

5. House band does use a lot of fuzzy matching - though one of the things I'd like to return to is seeing if I can fine tune this a bit. However! All the fuzzy matching occurs when some initial results are delivered. So, if HouseBand gets several matches ("I've found 5 matching items")...from that point on everything is fuzzy matched in various ways.

My own biggest frustration with HouseBand has to do with the search (especially classical, which it doesn't do well at all.)

Currently, HouseBand just sends a search string that returns all matches that *start with* with the string (in the MCWS search language, they are of the form, e.g.

Code: [Select]

[Name]=[title that starts with title HouseBand tries to deal intelligently with names that begin with numbers and symbols, but yeah - if the tracks start with A1 or B2, it won't find them.


For now, however, you can do a "string search." If you say, "Play Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" instead of "Play the album....." or "play the track...." it will perform an open ended search

Code: [Select]

[Name]=will match anything with these words
Steve

[WERTYU]

thank you for your information สมัครufabet [size]

[robt]

Hi sarkonovich

Just wanted to say thanks for all your hard work on this skill. I've been learning how it works with a Harmony Hub, Echo Dot and my music system since Christmas. I have massively impressed myself and a good number of friends with what it can do in conjunction with JRiver.

I went into this expecting to be underwhelmed and frustrated like so many "toys" these days that barely work, but this is different. It really is truly amazing and any issues I have are due to difficult naming of some of my albums, such as having multiple versions of the same album at different bit rates (and prefixing HD192.24 and the like). I already see how to deal with that.

So a genuine thanks for your efforts to take us all in to the future. I believe you are being assisted by the developers of JRiver and I for one would like to also "buy you a drink" as we say here in the UK. Please let us know how we can make a donation just to say thanks for your hard work.

This really is a huge leap forward for JRiver and I urge anyone thinking of having a go with this to do so without delay!

[sarkonovich]

Hi sarkonovich

Just wanted to say thanks for all your hard work on this skill. I've been learning how it works with a Harmony Hub, Echo Dot and my music system since Christmas. I have massively impressed myself and a good number of friends with what it can do in conjunction with JRiver.

Thanks for the nice words! I'm glad you're liking it.