Like others I wish to use Alexa to play my media. As I run a LX desktop (Ubuntu 16.04) which is switched on continuously with CD's ripped to ogg files, my hope was to: Tell Alexa to play a song, for Alexa to retrieve the song locally and output via its own speaker or connected speakers via bluetooth.
JRiver MC appears to be ideal, however as others have pointed out MC outputs locally *not* back through to the Alexa device. Below is my setup and experience of MC in the hope this post helps others.
I installed MC on my Linux server using the standard method described elsewhere to add the repository and install via apt-get.
Once installed I configured MC to use the local directory containing my media. As the media was scanned, I was impressed that MC indexed all the songs and used artist/album names to retrieve CD cover art although some I had to manually set.
For MC to respond to requests, its worth noting that voice commands to Alexa are sent to Amazon for recognition. The words are sent to the "HouseBand" skill and (hopefully) interpreted as commands that are sent back to MC via port 52199 through your firewall to your server.
As your media server responds to commands, note that music (or video) will be sent to whatever sound system MC is connected to. In many cases this is to MC's internal player and therefore output to any speakers connected to the PC.
However MC has the ability to scan your LAN and recognise any local DLNA servers. By asking HouseBand to "Switch zones" (although this hasn't worked for me yet) it is possible to direct music to an alternate sound system on a different zone. As on my LAN I have a IPTV box that runs a DLNA service which MC can direct music to as a separate zone.
In practice this setup sorta works. Voice commands to Alexa causes HouseBand to tell MC to play a particular song, album or artist. MC outputs the music to my lounge zone that is connected to my AV system.
What doesn't work is the ability to control the volume nor stop an album partway. Although MC is very comprehensive, it is prone to frequent crashes. MC is impressive albeit with some issues.
