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[john greenwood]

Let me begin by stating I have never tried to configure JRiver as a media server.  (I don't have JRemote.)  I have only used JRiver locally on my computer.  But I am getting a Google Home.  If I configure JRiver as media server and install and configure BubbleUPnP can I give voice commands to Google Home that will play music from my JRiver library.

I found this set of instructions:

https://www.computeraudiophile.com/ca/ca-academy/streaming-around-the-globe-or-around-the-home-with-jriver-media-center/

but I found them confusing.  I'm not sure how Airport products (none of which I own) get involved in this.  And I don't want to use JRemote.  This is for my kitchen where my hands are often busy and/or messy.

If there are better instructions available, can someone direct me to them?

Thanks and Merry Christmas.

Edit - I've found some posts on other threads that suggest that this is not possible yet.

[Awesome Donkey]

As far as I know, only Alexa (Amazon Echo) is supported via the House Band skill. Not seen anything about it working with Google Home.

https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,102709.0.html

[john greenwood]

Yes - I modified my post before I saw yours.

[dhiggins]

I've started work on a Google Home integration with MC

It works but I have not yet figured out how to "register" my service with Google as a "Music Service".

This has the effect of forcing you to say

"Hey Google, Ask My Media Service to play some Jazz in the living room"

instead of the much more reasonable

"Hey Google, Play some jazz in the living room"

It's livable but not ideal.

If anyone has any info on Apps For Google Home about how to register a Music service, I'd love to hear about it.

I've got a question into google support, still waiting for a response.

[john greenwood]

Good luck to you!

[Castius]

This has got me interested in making Android apps as well.
This is what I found so far.
https://developers.google.com/actions/smarthome/create-app
https://developers.google.com/actions/identity/account-linking

[john greenwood]

OK - I set up Media Network on JRiver 23 (newest build).  I then ran installation and setup for BubbleUPnP.  My kitchen and bedroom Google Homes now show up in Playing Now.  The Google Home App shows BubbleUPnP Server under the picture of each device on the Devices Page.  Each unit beeps when I select it from Playing Now.  But - no music on either of them.  Instead I get a variety of error messages in JRiver.  The most recent one said there was an error controlling the DLNA device.  Also, JRiver indicates an advance from track to track every few seconds. 

I am using a Windows 10 computer with the latest updates.  I do not want to connect to the internet (i.e. I only want to use it in my home).  Bear in mind that I am not only using BubbleUPnP for the first time, I am using Media Network for the first time.  I have tried reboots on both devices and restarted JRiver.  Is there any simple thing I may have overlooked?

[john greenwood]

I should add that I spent the other half of my day trying to do the same thing with LMS.  I finally got it to work after I installed some Windows firewall rules.  Even that didn't work at first, but then I tried shutting down McAfee's firewall and bingo.  And it continued to work after I restarted McAfee's firewall.

Are there firewall rules I should be trying here?  I actually tried to open ports 50850 and 50851 but I'm not really sure what I'm doing, so for the moment they're disabled.

[JimH]

I don't know what ports 50850 and 50851 are for.  BubbleUPnP?

JRiver uses 52100 to 52200.

You might set up a second copy of MC on another machine and get it working, just to get the hang of things.  And then move on to Bubble or another app.

[john greenwood]

Yes - BubbleUPnP uses 50850 and 50851.  In any event I have disabled the Firewall rules for those ports and uninstalled BubbleUPnP for the time being. 

I also started up MC on my other computer.  Call it JOHN_2013_PC.  That seems to work.  I can play music on my DLNA enabled Blu-Ray player, using either JRiver or the Blu-Ray remote.

But JOHN_2013_PC does not work either as Renderer or Server with respect to my other JRiver computer.  (Call it JOHN_WIN7PC although it is now running the newest Windows 10.)  Nor can JOHN_WIN7PC  act as a Server for my Blu-Ray player.    I get error messages on my Blu-Ray player.  And when I use it as a server for JOHN_2013_PC, it looks like it starts to play, but no music comes out.  And it stops after about 10 seconds.

Maybe the problem is that they are attached to different routers.  See map of my network.  John-G serves as an access point for John_2017.  This was done (with much online help) to solve a problem I confronted when I bought a new router in January, and one of my programs refused to work with it.

Edit - looking at the map I see that my Blu-Ray was connected to the same router as JOHN_WIN7PC.  Yet the MC on that machine still could not act a Server for it.

Further Edit - I installed BubbleUPnP on John_2013_PC.  When I opened JRiver I found my Google Home devices and could play music through them.  So the problem appears to be specific to JRiver on JOHN_WIN7PC.  FYI the LMS Server on that machine can render successfully to the Google devices.

[john greenwood]

Solved it (more or less).  It's a known McAfee firewall issue that can affect a range of media servers.  McAfee's workaround is to open up all devices to the media server program.  My personal workaround is to use my other computer as my media server.

Edit - it's even simpler than that.  Somehow my problem computer's network status got changed from private to public.  I just switched it back to private and the issue was resolved.

[Hilton]

I've started work on a Google Home integration with MC

It works but I have not yet figured out how to "register" my service with Google as a "Music Service".

This has the effect of forcing you to say

"Hey Google, Ask My Media Service to play some Jazz in the living room"

instead of the much more reasonable

"Hey Google, Play some jazz in the living room"

It's livable but not ideal.

If anyone has any info on Apps For Google Home about how to register a Music service, I'd love to hear about it.

I've got a question into google support, still waiting for a response.

Hey thanks for making a start with this. Are you able to share what you've got working?  I'm happy to help and contribute to the development and testing.

[chstuart]

John Greenwood, thank you for your post! Are you able to give verbal commands through Google Home to control JRiver MC? If so, how did you accomplish this and how does it work?

[john greenwood]

John Greenwood, thank you for your post! Are you able to give verbal commands through Google Home to control JRiver MC? If so, how did you accomplish this and how does it work?

Unfortunately, no - with BubbleUPnP I can cast from JRiver MC to my Google Home (effectively operating as a ChromeCast Audio).  This is what I wanted to do, although I wish I could give voice commands to JRiver MC.  I home dhiggins can help in that regard.

[sjhilton]

Hi - I've used these instructions https://www.reddit.com/r/googlehome/comments/6og8uu/google_home_to_control_win_10_pc/ to send simple commands ie start, stop, play, pause through my Google Home to JRiver. I was already using eventghost to manage my remote commands so it didn't require too much effort to set up autoremote, ifttt applets etc and attach these to macros in eventghost. This solution is far from ideal, because you have to define commands that are not the ones that are reserved by Google (eg say 'start' instead of 'play' etc) and of course Google Home has no awareness of the state of the system, content, what's playing etc. If anyone has any better ideas I'd love to hear them.

[john greenwood]

Hi - I've used these instructions https://www.reddit.com/r/googlehome/comments/6og8uu/google_home_to_control_win_10_pc/ to send simple commands ie start, stop, play, pause through my Google Home to JRiver. I was already using eventghost to manage my remote commands so it didn't require too much effort to set up autoremote, ifttt applets etc and attach these to macros in eventghost. This solution is far from ideal, because you have to define commands that are not the ones that are reserved by Google (eg say 'start' instead of 'play' etc) and of course Google Home has no awareness of the state of the system, content, what's playing etc. If anyone has any better ideas I'd love to hear them.

Thanks and congrats.

I read the instructions on the linked page, and they look somewhat challenging. I'm also not sure if I can achieve the result I (personally) want. 

1. Can I use the set-up you describe to have Google Home instruct JRiver to play a particular album or track?

2. Can I use Eventbrite to tell JRiver to cast the music (via BubbleUPnP) to my Google Home?

Right now, I have taken advantage of the option of uploading up to 50,000 tracks from my computer to Google Music.  (I actually uploaded about 10,000.)  There is no charge for this (as of yet ).  I should note that Google converts my lossless tracks to MP3s (or substitutes the MP3s it already has).  This is not a serious issue for me as playback will be on my Google Home, generally as background music.  With this setup I can tell Google Home to play albums, tracks or playlists from my uploaded library.  (In testing, I have found a bug or two, but they're manageable).  Classical could get more complicated if, for example, I wanted to play one of several uploaded versions of Beethoven's 5th Symphony, but I have curated the uploaded tracks to avoid that.

[sjhilton]

Thanks and congrats.

I read the instructions on the linked page, and they look somewhat challenging. I'm also not sure if I can achieve the result I (personally) want. 

1. Can I use the set-up you describe to have Google Home instruct JRiver to play a particular album or track?

2. Can I use Eventbrite to tell JRiver to cast the music (via BubbleUPnP) to my Google Home?

Right now, I have taken advantage of the option of uploading up to 50,000 tracks from my computer to Google Music.  (I actually uploaded about 10,000.)  There is no charge for this (as of yet ).  I should note that Google converts my lossless tracks to MP3s (or substitutes the MP3s it already has).  This is not a serious issue for me as playback will be on my Google Home, generally as background music.  With this setup I can tell Google Home to play albums, tracks or playlists from my uploaded library.  (In testing, I have found a bug or two, but they're manageable).  Classical could get more complicated if, for example, I wanted to play one of several uploaded versions of Beethoven's 5th Symphony, but I have curated the uploaded tracks to avoid that.

Hi,

At the moment I think the answer to the first question is no. The process is to set up autoremote both in Eventghost and your Chrome browser (Chrome needs to be open all the time for this to work). Once that's done you define applets that will be triggered by voice commands that will then open a public URL that gives the command to autoremote/eventghost, which then passes it to JRiver. My very basic understanding is that IFTTT can send variables from Google Home to Eventghost, but the way I've set up Eventghost it is listening for an event (in my system - start etc) not a string of text that you could say feed into a search field in JRiver. You might be able to do this with a python script that would send the string to an MCC search command (see https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Media_Center_Core_Commands), but that's beyond my scripting skills and I'm not sure whether there is a suitable search command that could be used (particularly for theater view).

The answer to the second question is yes. You could define an applet that would set the playback zone for J River to the Google Home (which would need to be set up as a DLNA Renderer as per your first post). I'm not sure how useful that would be if you can't send voice commands to search album, artist, genre, etc. Apologies if I've misunderstood how you've configured your system.

Hope that helps.

[Olivierr]

Hi dhiggins,

Could you share what you have developped that you mention in your post.
I just bought a Google Home and I will try to make it work with the registration.

Thanks

Olivier

I've started work on a Google Home integration with MC

It works but I have not yet figured out how to "register" my service with Google as a "Music Service".

This has the effect of forcing you to say

"Hey Google, Ask My Media Service to play some Jazz in the living room"

instead of the much more reasonable

"Hey Google, Play some jazz in the living room"

It's livable but not ideal.

If anyone has any info on Apps For Google Home about how to register a Music service, I'd love to hear about it.

I've got a question into google support, still waiting for a response.

[zeusl]

Hi dhiggins,

Could you share what you have developped that you mention in your post.
I just bought a Google Home and I will try to make it work with the registration.

Thanks

Olivier

If you get this to work, please share! 

[Awesome Donkey]

dhiggins' post is over a year old now with no further comment on potential development.

[zeusl]

dhiggins' post is over a year old now with no further comment on potential development.

Okey? In my browser it says: "2019-01-12, 21:57:56".
so I thought maybe oliverr' wanted to giv it a try...

[dhiggins]

Hi - I've used these instructions https://www.reddit.com/r/googlehome/comments/6og8uu/google_home_to_control_win_10_pc/ to send simple commands ie start, stop, play, pause through my Google Home to JRiver. I was already using eventghost to manage my remote commands so it didn't require too much effort to set up autoremote, ifttt applets etc and attach these to macros in eventghost. This solution is far from ideal, because you have to define commands that are not the ones that are reserved by Google (eg say 'start' instead of 'play' etc) and of course Google Home has no awareness of the state of the system, content, what's playing etc. If anyone has any better ideas I'd love to hear them.

I've been working (for quite some time now) on a Google Home to JRiver integration.


it works, but I'm not entirely sure how to push it past the "it works in my setup, but not in a generic sense" state.


Plus, to avoid putting holes in firewalls, it uses Azure functions and PubSub, which aren't trivial for non-devs to setup. Anyway. Just thought I'd mention it. One of the days hopefully!


Darin

[dhiggins]

Hey thanks for making a start with this. Are you able to share what you've got working?  I'm happy to help and contribute to the development and testing.

I'd love to have the help. The basic functionallity is all working as of now (I can say "Hey Google ask my media server to play some Prince in the kitchen" and, assuming you have Kitchen setup as a zone (and some prince tracks), off you go.


But getting it past the "it works on my network" stage is turning out to be a bit perplexing.


If you've worked with Google Assistant (or know someone who has) let me know!


Darin