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Soliciting advice about using Echo with my itunes library

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mberry593

Soliciting advice about using Echo with my itunes library
« on: January 12, 2019, 05:18:40 pm »
Hello.  I am new to all of this so please excuse me if my issue has been discussed before.  I did do some reading but I didn't see my situation exactly addressed.
For background I got into this for the benefit of my wife who has is severely disabled due to rheumatoid arthritis.  We are running an Echo plus 2nd gen, an Echo spot, several plug adapters, an Echo phone connect, and an Echo Link into our home HIFI.  All of this works great....no reservations....and has been a great help to my wife.
We have a medium sized itunes library (197 Gig - 12,467 items) which runs on a Windows 10 PC. Most of it is ALAC compressed.  A substantial portion is from vinyl that I have digitized and de-clicked with izotope RX.   These items are not and probably never will be available on CDs.   Home sharing allows us to access the library on our phones and other computers.  Siri controls it nicely.  These machines are on the same network as our Echo.

Now, what we would like to do is have Alexa control the library.  I understand that we will probably never see a skill that allows Alexa to directly do this.  I can't imagine Apple & Amazon cooperating on that.  But really this could be very simple.  All it takes is for Alexa/Echo to send speech directly to Siri.  Siri would do all of the interpretation.  Does anyone here know of any skill that can do that?  Actually the Connect telephone interface comes really close!

I know that one possible solution is to upload the library to Amazon's cloud music service.  I would rather not do that but if it turns out to be the only way, I will consider it.  I would prefer to stay in a lossless compression situation and retention of metadata like album art is very desirable.

So, what I am really asking here is has anyone dealt with this situation and do you have any wisdom to suggest?

Thank you.

Re: Soliciting advice about using Echo with my itunes library
« Reply #1 on: January 12, 2019, 05:52:08 pm »
it is a simple solution.  you can use either mymedia or plex to access your personal library via alexa.   I personally use mymedia.

https://www.mymediaalexa.com/
https://www.plex.tv/

mberry593

Re: Soliciting advice about using Echo with my itunes library
« Reply #2 on: January 13, 2019, 05:11:10 pm »
THANK YOU!  My Media is exactly what I was looking for.  It works perfectly.