A Possible Solution for Multi-Room Audio - Maybe You Can Implement?

[richaardvark]

Hello All/My Media for Amazon Alexa Team,

I just want to say "thank you" again for making such a dependable, feature-packed, fairly-priced, and downright awesome system/skill - I've had My Media for Alexa for close to a year now and have been very happy!

I am certain one of your most-requested features is the capability for multi-room music playback. I also realize that you all have done the best you can to bring us this feature, but that you are limited by the current Amazon APIs/the "AudioPlayer" interface in the Alexa skills kit is not designed to work with multi-room music or Alexa/speaker groups. It's really frustrating that Amazon has not made any headway here to make this a possibility. However, I suppose when we do take a moment to look at all the new features/enhancements that Amazon brought online this year, there's a lot to be grateful for. Still - being able to play my music in multiple rooms throughout my home, at the same time, is something I must have!

(lol, I will admit that in times of extreme desperation, I will run from room to room, will open MyMedia skill on each of my Echo devices and play then pause the song I want certain spot on each device, and then will frantically run from room to room and will un-pause MyMedia at the same exact place on each of my 8 Echo devices in an attempt to have multi-room music but, yeah... this is not a viable solution, lol. )

I do have a suggestion however - something I have toyed with and that does work and that I think the My Media for Alexa team could fairly easily implement into the existing skill/tool/server. The AudioPlayer interface in the Alexa skills kit does allow for playback of "live"/streaming media - this is how we are able to have multi-room music on other skills such as "TuneIn" radio, various podcasts, Flash Briefing skills, etc. I am not a developer, but I played around as best as I could and did manage to build my own personal demo Flash Briefing skill, setting the audio source to a live-streaming MP3 file on my own local server. I was then able to go to each of my Echo devices and open/play that "Flash Briefing" skill. When I went back to my server and played music with the output set to stream to that local MP3 file, I instantly had beautiful, synchronized music - playing together at the same time on all of my Echo devices throughout my home!

However, like I said, I am not a developer and barely knew what I was doing/was only able to make this happen using several "Flash Briefing" skill templates that I found online and picked-apart/merged together. My home-made multi-room audio skill worked for about an hour, but then my "Flash Briefing" 'episode' was old news and would no longer play. The Flash Briefing skill is probably not the best way to implement this type of setup, but it was the only way I could get this to work with my limited coding/web design capabilities.

With My Media for Alexa, we already have a dedicated local server hosting and playing our own media. Could you all maybe create a "virtual" local-playback device/output/stream/MP3 file on the My Media server that the user could then choose to select in My Media on any/each/all connected Echo devices? Perhaps this would require a second "My Media-Multi Room" playback skill? I know it would work! ✔ This is very similar to how other personal-server multi-room music streaming services work, such as "Squeezebox,'" etc. Perhaps we wouldn't need a second "My Media Multi-Room" skill, but could just request at each of our Echo devices for My Media to "play the multi-room stream" or something similar, and My Media for Alexa would play that live-streaming MP3 file located on our local My Media server.

I will continue to fiddle around with my clunky skill when I have time and am happy to share anything that you might find helpful, but I am sure you all have the knowledge and awesome development skills to make this work!

I just thought it wouldn't hurt to ask/beg...

(running across my home trying to synchronize My Media playback on multiple Echos just isn't really cutting it, lol )

Thanks again!

Richard

[bizmodeller]

Thanks for the great post and awesome you're lovin' My Media.

We have thought about something very similar to what you are suggesting....... but there may be an easier way that we are testing right now too. Are you in the US?

[richaardvark]

Thanks for the great post and awesome you're lovin' My Media.

We have thought about something very similar to what you are suggesting....... but there may be an easier way that we are testing right now too. Are you in the US?

Hi again - you're very welcome! Thank you for making such a solid and feature-packed tool and for offering it at an affordable price!

Yes, I'm in the US. I'm excited to hear that you have another possible solution to bring My Media to multiple devices - that's great! If you find you ever need someone to help with testing, I'm more than happy to help in any way I can!

In my own quest to make multi-room playback a reality, I've spent a little bit of time scouring the internet looking at various methods out there to set something like this up and have come across several tools/scripts/open-source applications that seem to work well for this sort of purpose. Though I'm pretty proficient with computers in general, I'm not a developer by any means, and I haven't had the time to put together my own working local stream/skill (other than the Flash Briefing skill I mentioned in my first post). Listed below are several resources that I've thought might be helpful here. These may not be of any use to you, since you are real developers who clearly already know what you're doing, but I thought I'd share anyway :

• Stream What You Hear - Small open-source program that sets up a live HTTP web stream of desktop audio.

• SoundIt - A Chrome application that also provides local network web streaming.

• AWS Streaming Audio Player Code Example - Supposedly works as intended, haven't tested.

• Single Stream Audio Skill (My Radio) An example Alexa skill that plays a single live HTTP audio stream. The instructions aren't quite up-to-date with the latest AWS dashboard interfaces, which is not surprising because Amazon seems to change them practically every other week, lol. I didn't spend a lot of time on this, but couldn't get it working.

If one of the tools/technologies at the first two links was to be successfully paired with one of the AWS scripts in either of the second two links, I think we'd be in business! ✔ Just thought I'd share in case there's anything there that might be a good option for adding local network/multi-room playback to My Media.

-Richard