I recently set up a Plex media server with Raspberry Pi. Everything works great, for the most part. I’m able to play movies on my Roku devices. The problem comes when I ask Alexa to play music from an artist on Plex. Alexa will always play the music on Amazon Music instead of from my Plex server.
If I say, “Alexa, ask Plex to play the artist Metallica” Alexa will say she can’t find it, even though it’s there - she does this with any artist I ask her to play. If I say, “Alexa, play Metallica on Plex” she plays it on Amazon Music instead. Alexa can see it, because if I ask her to play music on Plex, she plays some random song from my Plex library.
Does anyone know how I can get Alexa working properly with my Plex server?
Were you able to play any artist successfully? I did notice Alexa Voice Service matched that specific title to the wrong variable so our skill wasn’t able to properly compute what you wanted to play. I’d be curious if other artists successfully work for you.
Utterances must contain the skill invocation word before any request or it won’t successfully trigger the skill. This is a platform convention and nothing we have control over unfortunately. When you said on Plex in your second example AVS doesn’t actually parse that correctly. So you should always use ask Plex to, or tell Plex to, etc.
Good to know I have to put Plex at the beginning instead of the end. Thanks Vanstinator.
So I tried a bunch of stuff and found that Alexa won’t play any artist I ask her to except The Prodigy. I asked her to play about twenty different artists to no avail (Metallica, Iron Maiden, Casting Crowns, Garth Brooks, Shinedown, Iced Earth, Beethoven, Apocalypitca, etc. - I have somewhere in the neighborhood of 1500+ different artists in all types of genres). I guess she only likes Techno.
However if I asked Alexa to play a song or album, she would play anything that I had, including songs/albums from the artists she wouldn’t play (she played the albums Reload, Killers, Leave a Whisper and the songs Ride the Lightning, Run to the Hills, Institutionalized, etc.).
So it seems she has no problem playing a song or album, but won’t play an artist.
Okay, I gave it a good round of testing tonight. I don’t know what the difference was between tonight and the other day, but Alexa played anything I asked her too. I would say “Alex, tell Plex to play Iron Maiden” or “the artist Iron Maiden” or “music by Iron Maiden” and she understood it all.
However, she still would not play Metallica when asked to play “Metallica” or “the artist Metallica.” She would play Metallica when I asked her to play “music by Metallica.” She didn’t have a problem playing anyone else I asked her to, except for names that were unconventional/made up (e.g. Disharmonia Mundi).
Windows will not allow you to have a space at the end of a folder/file, but I did check it just to be sure. It does not have a space at the end of the folder.
