Alexa Media player not updating status

I anyone having an issue with the Alexa Media played integration?

For the last two days, I’ve had to restart the integration to get the devices to update. This poses a problem when I have automations and node-red that is triggered by the state of some of my echo devices.

It appears to work, then at some point during the evening it just stops working

2 Likes

I have had similar problems with my Kodi media integrations that I use for TTS, in my situation it required restarting HA several times to finally keep a connection. I believe there was an update to HA that finally resolved the issue during one of my restarts. I was never all my media integrations but a few each time; I can’t say what the true problem or solution were but just giving some data to you (mainly useless data, but at least you are not alone)

1 Like

1.5 year passed, but the problem seems still there.

If I reload the integration(alexa media player), the status could be synced…

I notice the same thing using 22.8.7. I’m guessing that support for alexa as an add-on is going away and will only be supported by using the cloud service :frowning:

Would be nice if there was a way to set an automation to reset the integration!

This is frustrating. I have managed to get it to update by using the “shuffle” button. Hopefully this could at leeast point someone in the right direction. Strangely the actual shuffle button never reports correctly as being on. it always appears to have failed but if I ask Alexa to turn shuffle on I get “shuffle is already turned on” so it clearly has turned on.

type: turn_on
device_id: 156f64d3a724574185ba6bff0691c077
entity_id: switch.my_echo_dot_with_clock_shuffle_switch
domain: switch

With the newest Echo Pop this isn’t applicable because the device doesn’t export the shuffle switch. More, it doesn’t export any entity out of the player, i.e. media_player.echo_pop_dinette

Hope this can be solved in some way.

Having this same issue myself even after a fresh Home Assistant reinstall on my RPi4. It’s really killing my system to not have this integration working correctly.

I am having the same issue, the state just stops updating and I have to reload the integration to get it to work again.

1 Like

Everything works… unit it doesn’t. I wish there was a way to just reload the integration every so often without having to go inside HA, hence why I am using an Echo device.

Also, the “next” and “previous” buttons aren’t working any longer.

Same problem here, sensors refresh only when i restart Alexa media player integration.

I also see this warning in logs :

Logger: homeassistant.components.recorder.db_schema
Source: components/recorder/db_schema.py:584
Integration: Recorder (documentation, issues)
First occurred: 00:09:19 (5 occurrences)
Last logged: 00:30:24

State attributes for sensor.chambre_de_romain_next_alarm exceed maximum size of 16384 bytes. This can cause database performance issues; Attributes will not be stored

You can reload the integration by using a shell command, have a look at Reload integration

I haven’t tried to integrate it in an automation that runs every x mins so don’t know how computationally demanding this solution is, yet it may worth a try

Keep in mind that it isn’t just a question of computational demand on our individual systems. If the changes that have caused the current issues are an attempt by Amazon to reduce API calls (because the Alexa project has been losing money since day 1 and their attempts to monetize it have so far failed), everyone spamming the API every minute may only serve to have them shutdown the free API in order to force a move to a subscription service.

I use a script and a button to reload them.
The script also can be started any X minutes by an automation or exposed to Alexa (scene) and you should be able to call it from there. But I haven’t tested latter yet.

alias: reload Alexa
sequence:
  - service: homeassistant.reload_config_entry
    data: {}
    target:
      device_id: c6ec22a9d53b7d166215fac2e5123ae1
mode: single

By doing so the whole integration and by this all devices are reloaded.