Music assistant with alexa media player

Hello everyone
I’m trying to play music on my alexa devices using music assistant and alexa media player, but when I try to play something, Alexa says “to send tts please set announce equals true, music can’t be played this way”.
Can anyone tell me how to set announce to true?

AFAIK, this is not going to work… at least not in the way that you probably want. Amazon is pretty restrictive on the file type, encoding, and length of audio files that can be played.

According to Marcel (MA lead dev) last month:

This question pops up almost every day and the answer is that MA does not work with Alexa because Amazon does not have an API for this. I have one of those Echo Dot devices now on my workbench to give it a shot in make it working but I’m afraid the experience is never going to be perfect.

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What a bummer :disappointed:, do you think it might change when “matter cast” is released? I’m patiently waiting for this, with the hope that something changes on the Alexa side, about its ridiculous limitations, otherwise, I’m thinking about ditching it entirely and moving to Google. I don’t care very much about the assistants I want a reliable way to play music all around the house.
Anyway, thank you very much for the answer!

I haven’t really been keeping up with Matter, so I’m probably not the best person to make forecasts about that. But, unless it’s an absolute requirement of the Matter standard, I don’t know that I would plan for Amazon to adopt it… because they have a poor track record.

Alexa owners have been asking for them to add local casting since the 1st Gen devices. At the time Amazon was engaged in a campaign of introducing anti-Google policies, blacklisting Google-related apps like YouTube from their FireTV platform. So it’s not surprising that they wouldn’t adopt the nearly-ubiquitous protocol from Google. Amazon made some announcements they would release their own casting protocol. When it was finally released, it turned out it’s not local, it basically only works with Amazon Music, and only works with certain Alexa-enabled devices. The cold, hard fact is that any local casting has the probability of eating away at the Alexa division’s revenue stream, and they already lose so much money on that they probably can’t afford to do it.

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@Emilio256 @Didgeridrew If this were true, then you wouldn’t see skills like MyMediaAlexa which allow for as many and as long of songs as you want including your own MP3’s to play to any Echo Device. But that skill does work, outside of the Alexa app, which suggests to me that there is a way to do it - we just haven’t found it yet.

My Media for Amazon Alexa

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Any progress on this? I just installed music assistant and seems cool but useless for me since all my rooms have 1 Amaozn Echo… I dont know what to do :frowning:

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Personally Ive fired Alexa, she just doesn’t know it yet.

BTW just for anyone who comes checking on this a year later… I wouldn’t no ever expect this scenario to work. Because Amazon.

For those who say ‘I’ve seen it done’ I have no doubt. But realize Amazon is a consistently moving target and most of AMP is built on undocumented apis so… Yeah maybe it worked but officially it doesn’t and you can’t build on maybe. Nits a support nightmare.

Matter casting MIGHT solve it when it comes (note a year after the initial ask and still not here… New spec moves slow- honestly I don’t expect wide use of matter cast until 2026 or later) when it comes. I don’t see any existing Amazon devices that will get that feature.

So don’t hold your breath. You’ll turn blue first.

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That is really a bummer. I plan to replace all my Alexas in the future but for now I need them to play music and audio books.

Man I should have gone full Fully Kiosk + Tablets… What a wast of money this Amazon Echo system is :unamused:

seems we need a jailbreak for echo devices so we can use them the way we want…
the hardware with the speakers and microphone arrays are great, maybe some soldering and an esp are a solution?

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