For many years now my Halloween automation, in addition to triggering lights, played an audio track with VLC Media Player on a PC connected to a wireless speaker (not Sonos). I never got this working last year as I didn’t realize there was a problem until an hour before showtime. Looking for a solution I found this post suggesting an Edge driver for VLC but the link to the wiki is no longer working: Edge driver for VLC thing?
Since I don’t have any “smart” speakers I need this to run on a PC, however, it doesn’t need to be VLC necessarily (it’s what I had found 6 or so years ago and it worked great). Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Based on the lack of responses, it appears there’s no way of getting this to work unfortunately. So I found this post (How to enable "Play Message on Speaker" as an Action for a Routine - #2 by KenW48360), regarding playing a “message” on a speaker which got me wondering if I could get one of my Echo Dots to play the MP3 audio file triggered by the automation (which I could connect to my wireless speaker). Any ideas on this one?
Alexa will play “songs” from your library as actions in a routine, so you ought to be able have her do it. Create a virtual momentary switch in ST and include the separate Alexa contact sensor in the settings. Also set it to auto-revert. Use that in ST Routines and create an Alexa routine triggered by the virtual contact switch. I use this method for a number of different things such as setting the input on my home theater receiver, changing modes on my thermostat, and playing greetings when we arrive home. Here is an example of what your routine might look like (ignoring that I used one of my existing virtual sensors as the trigger):
Thanks for the replies. I was able to add the audio track to the Amazon Music library, create the virtual switch and include it in the automation. I still need to test it tonight but it seems that everything will work fine. Thanks again!
