Playing my CDs

[Tentpole]

I have lots of CDs I want to play by voice control, HOW ?  Amazon have done away with upload to cloud so I can't use their player.

[mike27oct]

Amazon Alexa devices can not do this.  A question was asked last week of how to play from a portable CD player to Alexa device.  Search the site for this post using key words .

[Drwoodr]

I’m thinking you don’t want to physically play a cd, but just want to play your personal files ripped from cd’s? I haven’t done this, but Plex looks like it can do this. You’d have to have the Plex server running on a pc, or a network attached storage device that has Plex.  Western Digital has NAS devices with built-in Plex.

Edit: did some searching, another option imight be “my media” skill, https://www.mymediaalexa.com. Again I haven’t tried it, but looks fairly inexpensive compared to Plex.

[Drwoodr]

Also, Western Digital’s My Cloud Home apparently has a skill that allows Alexa commands to play your personal music files from their NAS device to an Echo without the need for a 3rd party media server.

Of course, none of these options are free.

[Alexa in Canada]

I still maintain a CD 5 disc player as part of my AV setup. I use Harmony Hub to control it. Using Harmony as a bridge you easily set up Activities that can link to Alexa so can say Alexa Turn on my CDs, it will turn on receiver and CDs and start to play them.

You can do more with the same setup.

Hope that helps.

[Drwoodr]

Alexa in Canada, I have a similar setup, but I had posted earlier in the month about an issue I have with actually playing my CDs. I have a routine in Alexa that turns on my cd player and receiver, but I can't figure out how to get it to start playing a cd. In the Harmony skill, they have play/pause examples like "Play TV" or "Pause Netflix", but anything I try with the word "play" starts playing music in spotify. I even tried "Play [device name]" where device name is the name of my CD player in the Harmony hub. Does your activity automatically start playing CDs, or are you using a voice command to start playing them after it turns on?

I still maintain a CD 5 disc player as part of my AV setup. I use Harmony Hub to control it. Using Harmony as a bridge you easily set up Activities that can link to Alexa so can say Alexa Turn on my CDs, it will turn on receiver and CDs and start to play them.

You can do more with the same setup.

Hope that helps.

[Alexa in Canada]

Alexa in Canada, I have a similar setup, but I had posted earlier in the month about an issue I have with actually playing my CDs. I have a routine in Alexa that turns on my cd player and receiver, but I can't figure out how to get it to start playing a cd. In the Harmony skill, they have play/pause examples like "Play TV" or "Pause Netflix", but anything I try with the word "play" starts playing music in spotify. I even tried "Play [device name]" where device name is the name of my CD player in the Harmony hub. Does your activity automatically start playing CDs, or are you using a voice command to start playing them after it turns on?

I still maintain a CD 5 disc player as part of my AV setup. I use Harmony Hub to control it. Using Harmony as a bridge you easily set up Activities that can link to Alexa so can say Alexa Turn on my CDs, it will turn on receiver and CDs and start to play them.

You can do more with the same setup.

Hope that helps.

The solution is similar to other ways you can use Harmony Hub to do things that are not easy to do normally in Alexa.  You set up the activity in Harmony Hub app , in my case it is called Listen to CDs. You might have to add an activity step such as Play to the Activity.

Alexa reserves certain words like Play for other specific things, so don't use that word in the Activity.

After syncing with Alexa, I start playing CDs by saying Alexa, turn on Listen To CDs. Harmony turns power on to my receiver , my CD player and then starts playing.

I hope that helps.

[Drwoodr]

I don’t have the play command built into my harmony activity in case I want to swap CDs, but I may need to do that.  What I can’t understsnd is why play and pause work with my harmony hub when watching Netflix, etc., but not when using it to play a CD.

[Alexa in Canada]

I don’t have the play command built into my harmony activity in case I want to swap CDs, but I may need to do that.  What I can’t understsnd is why play and pause work with my harmony hub when watching Netflix, etc., but not when using it to play a CD.

I assume you are referring to Alexa voice commands to Play and Pause. I still need more experience with it to be certain, however, I think it boils down to what level of detail Harmony chooses to include in the Skill that is being used by Alexa.  Since Alexa is being used only to interpret Voice Commands and then pass them on to Harmony for execution, the Harmony skill needs to both supply a list of commands for Alexa to understand as well as be able to execute them. Given the massive number of possible commands Harmony can control in the number of devices it supports, I assume they only focus on the most common, most modern devices to pass detail control to Alexa. 

For now I assuming that I will always use a remote to do something after I get Alexa to start an activity.

[nuraman00]

I was able to use Air Play in iTunes to stream music to my AVR ("Home Theater").

Can I take this one step further?

Can I tell Alexa to play a CD (that's already inserted) and Air Play it to my "Home Theater"?

What about telling Alexa to play a playlist from my iTunes, consisting of digital files, to my "Home Theater", using Airplay (not Bluetooth)?

I don't think Alexa knows about my computer yet.

It also doesn't know about receiver, I am working on that.  I can link my receiver to Alexa from the Heos app.  I'll do that sometime.

[David N]

Echo Link now has the firmware which allows multiroom playback of your cd's/mp3's/records on any group of echos in your house and your stereo speakers all at the same time.