Amazon has freshly certified *V6.0* of MediaServer. Because there were
changes to the voice-model, the Alexa app will reflect it as updated
this time round. As always, you don't need to do anything for access
you invariably run the latest version whenever you invoke the skill.
- All *Stream* commands are now *free* to use -without- subscription.
Yaay! This is also true for the *Sleep* commands. The number of
intents is now 129, with 94 available without subscription.
- It's now available in *Canada* from Amazon.ca. Finally! :rolleyes:
- There are 7 new intents:
- Play/stream *early* Aretha Franklin.
- Play/stream *recent* David Gilmour.
- Play/stream songs *from* 1976.
- When an APL list item (image or text) is displayed on screen: e.g.
*Third* (to select the item by ordinal rather than by name or
touch).
- The *short* response mode has been removed as nobody ever used it
and it needed active maintaining.
The early/recent concept builds a mathematical *set* from all the
declared years in an artist's oeuvre (based on the -year- tag). This is
sorted and chopped down the middle, whereby -early- then refers to the
first half and -recent- selects the second half. The skill performs its
own Fisher-Yates shuffle on the resultant tracklist and sends it to LMS
as an array of track_id's (limited to 500 entries). Meaning that the
list should be different each time you call it for the same artist. Note
that if your albums are populated with tags reflecting the year
associated with e.g. recent remasterings or greatest-hits releases
(rather than the year of original release), you may find that e.g.
Waterloo by ABBA is showing up under recent rather than early. Remember,
the year tag holds whatever -you- put in it. :p Thanks to @staresy for
suggesting these commands.
The play/stream-songs-from-year intent uses ['playlist', 'loadtracks',
'track.year=' + year] under the hood, meaning that any shuffling has to
be done by LMS itself. If you are on a recent 8.3 then LMS will
automatically shuffle this list regardless of the player's settings. If
on an earlier LMS version then you will always get exactly the same list
of songs in the same order, unless the player in question has shuffle
enabled.
The reason that the Stream commands are now free has to do with all the
APL stuff recently added to MediaServer for the visuals. Handling that
is way heavier on my back-end than streaming, so it no longer makes
sense to see streaming as 'premium'. I also genuinely believe that a
device like the Echo Show gen 2 is an affordable 2022 alternative to the
Squeezebox Radio. It sounds -really- good for its size and has a
gorgeous full-HD 8" touchscreen to boot. Maybe now people will discover
this for themselves...
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