Wow… THis app is great. I had already uploaded my music to Amazon for 25$ a year…but I still wanted to see if I could find a way to just get it from my PC music files and then I saw your post.
Thanks so much for letting us know. I never had heard about My Media, and I am a Googling nut looking for stuff out there. I created account, gave it my $5 and access to my music files on pc, and I now can get Alexa to go directly to my files through MyMedia. Other than having to say the extra skill ‘MyMedia’ when asking Alexa, it is working great.
I just found out you can upload music to amazon music with the amazon music app. Add the uploaded song to a playlist, then tell alexa to play that playlist. Tada! Local music alexa plays!
I have a QNAP server and can get Alexa to play the music on it. Bluetooth pair your phone with Alexa, open vlc media player and select local network. Select your server and drill down to the music folder. Select the songs to be played, then tap the first one to start playing and you can then close VLC media player and the music continues to play from the server. Open VLC media player to stop playback or give Alexa another command.
I can confirm this is working in the UK. Could be improved but is better than nothing. I.e. shuffle doesn’t work, searching by song title is flaky, there’s no album/artist/song listing on Echo Show.
Another option is a Synology NAS with Audio Station, but US only at the moment. May be possible with other NAS as well.
Yet another option is playing from Google or One Drive. There are a few skills in this area.
Have you seen this skill? (from Amazon in Alexa Skills › Music & Audio › Streaming Services)
My Media for Alexa lets you voice control and stream music from your home media collection to your Amazon Echo or Amazon Dot device.
To get started, visit https://www.mymediaalexa.com and click the Download link to install the My Media for Alexa app on the computer that contains your home media library or iTunes library.
Once installed, you will be asked to enter your Amazon credentials to link My Media with Amazon. Once you have done this, simply select the folders on your computer that contain your music collection, or alternatively select your whole iTunes library.
Now just ask Alexa to play your music, for example:
“Alexa, ask My Media to play music by Michael Jackson”
The first time you invoke My Media you may be asked to link My Media with your Amazon account - use the Alexa companion app to do this and please ensure you use the same Amazon account you used when you installed the My Media app on your computer.
Just set this up, literally 20 minutes ago. Took about 15-20 min start to finish.
Sadly, for Canadian users, for whatever d&*m reason it isn’t available, but a ‘quick change’ to your Amazon account to be US based is all that is needed.
It worked flawless for a ‘little bit’ but then wifi latency caused some hiccups. My house is full of “heavy users” and in my remote location we don’t have huge-bandwidth, but urban users will LOVE IT.
To summarize. Have Alexa and an Echo, installed and added My Media skill. This allowed me to remotely ‘stream’ music from my local computer through to the Amazon devices. (NOT over Bluetooth)
I have been using this in the UK for 6 months without any real problems. A few glitches at the start but fine now. I think it was about £4 / year subscription.
well i have got some kind of success with my media its kinda hit and miss some times but it does work ,
1 on pc , down load mymedia and login the find file path,find music file, and scan.
2 download mymedia on alexa app
3 link the two
4 party with your music !
To be fair I have used Plex media server for a while so my natural instinct was to get that up and running with alexa. It works well I have libraries for podcasts and audio books as I have a good source to audio books through work which lets me download them. I then added them to my plex server and I can use alexa to play them. Far better than paying £7.99 per month with audible for 1 book. It also plays my TV shows, Movies and music.
Admittedly some titles need renaming so alexa can find them and I havent seemed to have it able to play in multi room yet just 1 device or another but not both but still new to that.
You also have chice of sinking your PC music with Google Drive or Microsoft One drive and play your music with Starfish Audio and Starfish Drive. Both supports playing a folder or you can create playlist:
Cost $1.99/year via paypal. No external software needed but you need to link couple of accounts. One with Alexa to Starfish and another to your cloud provider
There is an Alexa skill for this that is endorsed by amazon. I love it when people have to spout out about things they are so certain of such as “Amazon will NEVER allow this as they are trying to sell you music” and then to get proven so completely wrong. It looks like some know it alls really know nothing. Enjoy the link, it works flawlessly.
Agreed. I love it, and helped my neighbor set it up, too. I have my songs and my daughter’s songs on two separate directories, and created playlists for each of our sets, so I just have to say, “Alexa, ask mymedia to play Eric playlist”, so it’ll focus on my songs.