It would be great to have PLexAmp as an Alexa skill so that I can break away from the crappy music player they have and play my own music without issues!
There is already a Plex skill. The skill has nothing to do with other Plex clients. Alexa will play directly form your server so the clients you are using for other purposes don’t matter. Can you describe your idea more?
Plexamp differs from Plex in that plexamp handles my music where currently Plex does not. when I ask Alexa to open Plex all it tries to do is watch movies or TV it will not play my music.
Do you mean you want to use Alexa to playback to the PlexAmp client on your device or computer?
Nope. I want there to be a skill for Alexa to play my plex music library thru PlexAmp with it’s cool feature set.
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Isn’t that the same thing?
No right now Alexa has only the Plex app and that app only plays videos. Just like on my phone where I have a Plex app and I have a Plexamp app I want to have both on Alexa.
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i can play music through my echo/alexa via plex skill. I simply say
“alexa, ask plex to play one step closer by linkin park”… and it starts playing on the echo. I’m confused on your post.
I WOULD however, would love to be able to CAST to my echo/alexa.
@anon18523487 just to clarify… echo/alexa does NOT directly play from local server, for some odd reason it get’s redirected to a remote location then back. it would be nice, but apparently this is an amazon thing.
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As mentioned by sekthree, Alexa will play music. To clarify, when you use the Plex for Alexa skill, Alexa pulls content directly from your server. If you have a music library on the Plex server, it will play that content directly on the echo device itself. If you choose a Plex client, Alexa will playback onto that client. You cannot redirect Alexa to play to another Echo device.
“Alexa, tell Plex to play Dr Dre” will playback a shuffled track from Dr Dre directly onto that echo device, assuming you have Dr Dre in your music library.
“Alexa, tell Plex to Play Dr Dre on Bob’s Android Tablet” will play Dr Dre on the Plex for Android app with the device name “Bob’s Android Tablet”.
PlexAmp does not support Alexa or vice versa, however you want to see it, so the above of redirecting the output to play to a device will not playback to the PlexAmp app.
In the Plex amp app you have features built in that are not built into standard play of music. I am aware that I can play single songs or artists. But I can’t do things like play time travel radio for example which is built into plexamp. Alexa ask Plex to play my Gothic music also does not work. So basic functionality that I would do in plexamp I cannot do with Alexa… if there was a Plex amp app for Alexa then it would probably work
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just an FYI, radios are NOT specific to Plexamp… and to test your concern i just did the following
“alexa, ask plex to play time travel radio”
“playing time travel radio”
Donna by Richie Valens began to play…
and to test another
“alexa ask plex to play linkin park radio”
“playing linkin park radio”
Linkin park began to play.
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Yeah, those extra features are from PMS and should work through Alexa.
Alexa goes through your PMS so you can try issuing it a command, then if it doesn’t work, get me the log from PMS so I can check what happened.
If you provide me with some instructions I will make it happen.
Try some of the commands mentioned above by sekthree, then get the log. Let me know what commands you tried.
Is there any way to get plex music playing via Alexa without speech commands? If not then this is something needed.
I love how I can open the Spotify app on my phone, navigate to a playlist then select Alexa from the audio choices. No need to talk at all. Is this something that can be added in the plexamp app?
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No. Plex is unable to control what device music playback occurs on. I believe this is only available to the 1-st party music providers. Other skills are not allow to do this.
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An adjunct request. It would be great to be able to build a radio stream from a playlist. For example, I have 100s of Holiday tracks, some pop, some rock, etc. I would like to create a radio station of a holiday subset (say Pop). Before you tell me use a Playlist, it is a start but doesn’t give the flexibility and random playback. And the Alexa Plex app is notoriously annoying when it can’t understand “Alexa, ask Plex to shuffle Holiday Pop”. I think she hates me.
YES! this. If not for anything else for the track loudness leveling in plexamp! Sick of having one song LOUD and the next quiet, and having to tell Alexea “Turn down” or “Turn Up”. My collection already has the loudness (Replay Gain) meta data imbedded in the id3 tags thanks to Foobar 2000. My XBMC server plays so well with these tags and everything is normalized, lets have the same for Alexa.
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The person is asking for a Skill that links purely for music like plexamp acts purely on music.
There is a plex skill that handles the plex server but it doesn’t search the music library very well, when I ask for a music track, it very rarely gets this correct, to the point it is unusable.
So he is asking for a skill to purely act upon the music library and leave the video alone, so for me I have called my plex movies section, ie plex server (kevflix) and when I installed the plexamp on my phone I specified that as kevify.
He wants to be able to say play superman from kevflix and it comes on the TV and be able to say play Dancing Queen on kevify and it plays from the music library.
In essence all you need to do is adjust the existing plex skill to treat the music library as a separate thing and perform searches on it that actually work well and produce results.
Hope I’ve helped you and the Moderator understand what you are asking for here, I would like to see this also.
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If there were 2 different skills you would need 2 different commands. i.e.
Alexa, tell Plex to play Superman
Alexa, tell Plex Music to play Dancing Queen
Also, there isn’t a way to have the skill only search a specific type of library. Alexa can only send a single search term, no modifiers/parameters to allow limiting the search. If the current skill isn’t finding your music, please reproduce the command and then provide me the logs from PMS so I can check what it is searching for.
