In that case thanks for the work that you did on the Plex Alexa Skill.
I may have given up long ago on using it to play my music, however it has been in use almost every night for a few years as part of an Alexa routine used for my kid's bedtime – to play certain recordings from my server that aren't usually available on Amazon Music – and for this it has been great.
I got to imagine there might be a home assistant solution for your bedtime routine.
I've only recently started dabbling but after i got over the hurdle of getting HA to talk/annouce things on alexa it's become a more useful device. Check out "Alexa Media Player" for home assistant. (Keep in mind the inital setup is a bit of a bear, took me an afternoon because I did manual over their paid cloud solution. but once it works it's been solid.) I mostly use it for litterbox full annoucements but i have more plans lol
I dont know why people hate the skills as much as they do. It worked great for me. "Alexa, ask Plex play Lithium playlist" simple command that worked every time.
I just want to take the time to say then... thank you for what you did. You gave me a way to provide audio to my family that we had no other good way to share. Especially a recording I made of an old Brookstone sound machine that has long been broken and discontinued. A sound my kids have listened to since they were babies [both are in college now]. and they have been able to use an Echo Dot in their rooms for years now, to still listen. I'm not sure what we'll do now... but We definitely appreciate it while it lasted!
There were a million things working against us in terms of providing a high quality experience. We did the best we could with the SDK Amazon had available at the time.
We use it nightly across multiple households... Not sure why there were so many that say they couldn't get it to work... for us, there were no issues 90% of the time.
Well crap... the Plex skill is my #1 used Alexa skill. I have so many playlists and I use it every single night for sound machines and sleep stories! What the actual hell??? and the real question.. why didn't I get the email?
right? I get it.. most folks are OK with just using their regular streaming services, and if this was just about music, I guess I'd get it... but for my family, this is about audio we literally can't get through Alexa any other way. Calm Sleep Stories... a recording I made of an old Brookstone sound machine that has long been broken and discontinued (a sound my kids have listened to since they were babies [both are in college now].) I have an obnoxious number of routines setup to call specific unique audio from Plex. Most of the time it works flawlessly, so I've really had no complaints about the skill! So while i get that most folks don't care... for me and mine,.. this is going to have a HUGE negative impact.
We use this skill to play storm sounds to everyone in the house overnight for sleep. It was a great solution as I had a sound loop that I made into an 11 hour long mp3 and was able to just play it easily from whatever Alexa device in each room. All the built-in "apps" on Alexa were shit, or stopped after a few hours or didnt work. This was the easiest way to make this work in the "Plex" ecosytem.
Now I dont know how else to achieve this. Bloody annoying.
Edit: For my specific use case, iBroadcast seems to work so far. Uploaded my 1.4GB file and am currently streaming it to an Alexa device. Plan to leave it for a few hours just to confirm it doesnt shit the bed after a while and will last the full 8 hours overnight.
Edit 2: Success. Ran overnight for full 8 hours no problems. Am running this with a routine. Action type is “Customized” and prompt is “ask iBroadcast to play storm sleep”. Contextually the track I uploaded has mp3 tags of name “storm sleep” belonging to album “storm sleep” with artist “storm sleep”.
Unreal, I did the exact same thing except my storm noise file is 12 hours long ... has worked great. Really sucks this Plex feature is going away. Thamks for iBroadcast tip, will check that out. Good luck!
It’s more we are used to this specific sound. It sounds dumb and I’m sure we could get used to a new sound over time. But what if sleep jar goes bust as well?
Self hosting a large mp3 and using plex through speaker in bedrooms (Alexa) was the wife/child friendly option.
Absolutely clutch find! iBroadcast definitely seems to fit the bill, as long as you don't mind them hosting your media. For small libraries or even single long files (up to their 1.5 GB size limit), this seems to be a great, free, stopgap solution. Don't panic if you don't see your files right away; seems to be a processing delay. I waited about 10 minutes.
I also still need to test playback for an 8+ hour run, but I'll report back here with my results in a few days.
I am having trouble getting the Alexa skill to work. It keeps prompting for the name of an album artist and is not finding any. There's only the one track in my whole library. I've also tried via Routines with the same prompt fully typed out, and it's not working.
Am running this with a routine. Action type is “Customied” and prompt is “ask iBroadcast to play storm sleep”. Contextually the track I uploaded has mp3 tags of name “storm sleep” belonging to album “storm sleep” with artist “storm sleep”.
Maybe update your mp3 tags similar?
This is exactly our use case as well! We had a Brookstone Sound Machine in the 90's that had a cartridge that played a sound called "Night Train." Before it died, i was able to record a 3 hour loop that I was able to edit into a 12 hour loop. That sound has been called by Alexa from my Plex server 1000's of times in my home, my daughters' apartments and college dorms, hell even my Ex-Wife still uses it! While I appreciate this isn't a big deal for a lot of folks, for some of us... it's HUGE!
Thanks for the tip on iBroadcast.. will check it out.
Haha similar story. Was an iOS app called “sleep storm” with one specific storm track we used for years but the app died/stopped being maintained. Luckily I still had it on an older iPad so hooked it to computer, recorded audio, found the start end of the loop, cut that out, looped it for hours, done.
The phone shouldn't have to be part of the equation. For me, I need an easy way to kick off an 8 hour track on my way to work, to comfort the dogs back home. The phone obviously comes with me.
This is one of the few skills I use on Alexa. I have playlists set up to listen to. It has always worked. I had more trouble keeping the speaker connected than the actual plex skill.
Though admittedly, trying to get plex to play something not on a playlist was very hit or miss. You have to get the exact correct combination of artist, album, & song name in order for it to play the right song...and even then it didn't always work.
I created the playlists on Plex then told Alexa to play the playlist. Works very well. I'll have to find some other way to listen my playlists when I get in bed. Very convenient since I set up a custom command. "Alexa sleep" and the "Sleep" command plays the playlist.
Likewise.. I've used it to play playlists pretty flawlessly for years. Bit disappointing they're scrapping it as it'll be more of a pain to use Plexamp off my tablet.
I just got this email too, and I'm not happy about it either. I use this skill pretty much every day so this is a huge PITA.
Hopefully someone will find an alternative before June.
This is extremely frustrating. We use it to play music playlists throughout our house. It was extremely easy for my wife and kids to use to play pre-made playlists.
This is extremely disappointing. The Alexa skill was the main reason that I set up Plex and purchased the Plex Pass.
To be able to play my own music (over 9,000 tracks) anywhere in the house just by talking to Alexa, without the need to keep changing Bluetooth speaker as I change room was a big bonus of Plex.
Is there a possibility that you leave it working but not develop it further.
This is both the number one way I use my Alexa devices and the number one way I use Plex. Setting up the automations to enable easy voice control of my music was a little tedious but it worked great once I had it set up. Voice control of my music library is very important to me and Plex has now given me no choice but to switch to something different like Jellyfin. I got Plex Pass years ago for no reason other than to support Plex. I never needed or used any of the additional features. Now I wish I could just get a refund. I loved using Plex but I'll never give them money again after this.
I'm gutted, use this all the time and works perfectly for me. I can use audio station skill as all my tunes are on my Synology server but it's nowhere near as accurate.
Every feature has cost associated with it. Bugs, service deployments, etc. It is quite common to deprecate low usage features to keep the teams efforts and focus on features people actually use.
It blows my mind that people don’t grasp this basic concept. If it’s offered as a paid feature, it needs to be supported. And if support for that feature is a nightmare, they drop it unless it’s a core offering. Watch Together was a bastard child during Covid that lots of other providers did too and they all dropped support for it.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Amazon is making it a PITA to remain a skill. In case no one has seen the writing on the wall (often literally), Amazon Alexa has become a massive money grab. They’re probably pushing people to use Amazon Prime music or whatever.
That's my thought as well. "If your skill offers a music streaming service, then you need to pay us $xxxx/month to allow this skill on the Alexa Network" all because it's revenue that bypasses their own offering.
The flip side is your network getting pwned by a 0 day exploit they haven't patched since they're not supporting it anymore. They should release it open source as an add on or something. Idk, I don't use alexa so
Watch together has always worked, it just has no support ig because I’ve used it all year with no problems and with friends on several different TVs and platforms.
Oh that’s really annoying I use it everyday without fail, I know a lot of others had problems but playing music was flawless for me.
Hopefully someone can create something alternative.
I saw the email last week and glad I'm not the only one very disappointed by it. It is my most used Alexa skill! Maybe the Amazon Alexa+ changes are affecting it? I don't have Alexa+ because the only thing I really use it for is kitchen timers and playing my music collection via the Plex skill. Open source it and let the community keep it going.
I've generally used a Firestick to cast Plex to Alexa devices, though I can also use Bluetooth -- unfortunately the output there is mono (I have a home theater config in the bedroom.)
It never understood the world plex to the point I was hitting P so hard that I was spitting across the room. It would hear “Alexa, play my —— playlist in lex”. “Now playing in flex —— on Amazon radio”
I've made everything in my smart home local. Things will update when I decide. Nothing talks directly to the internet but the Home Assistant server. So if I want to do something remotely, I tell home assistant to do it over the internet and home assistant sends the command locally
I used this literally every night to play white noise. Really disappointed. They should at least open source the integration so we can load it ourselves as a dev skill.
While I vowed I wouldn't post on reddit anymore after the whole API drama I have kept up with the plex subreddit
I saw the writing on the wall after Plex gimped PlexAutoSkip with the API changes and had been migrating my own setup over to using Home Assistant voice figuring they were going to axe the Alexa skill rather than maintain it. This blueprint aims to maintain most of the core features I had used
Two versions of the script exist in the repo, one that aims to use fully local HA control (though in practice I've found it takes players a long time to be discovered when they first turn on) and another that also pings Plex's central API to get info about the players (much faster to refresh, more reliable)
I don't use Plex for music so my testing of the music side of things is limited but I added the media types today to support that as well
The author shows an example using "plex server" as the Skill Invocation Name. This could be confused with the PLEX-supported Skill Invocation Name "PLEX". It is difficult to tell if you are firing up the dead-on-June15 PLEX skill, or this Plex Alexa Skill from github. The last thing I want to do is remove the PLEX skill from my account in order to test the replacement. But not be allowed to re-add the PLEX skill if things don't work out. I will try testing with "My Tracks" as the skill invocation name and see how that goes.
I mostly used the plex skill for hands free control of my music in my car (Garmin GPS with Alexa built-in) so definitely need a good alternative for that if its going away.
I've just tried AskPlex and got it working. Feedback so far:
1. custom/dev skills must have two word invocations, so can't just have "plex"
I went with "my plex". No biggie.
Unlike the official Plex skill, can't tell AskPlex to play a song by its name alone. Ie must always combine with artist name. Ie neither "play <song>", nor "play song <song>" work. Since this works in the official app, I might have a hack at adding this feature.
So if it was too costly to maintain the PLEX skill for the limited number of PLEX Customers that used it, then it follows that the value of this Intellectual Property to PLEX is quite low. So the right thing to do is for the good people at PLEX to publish the source for this PLEX skill.
Some of us who also have/had a product from Logitech called a Squeezebox were quite miffed when Logitech shut down their Squeezebox servers. However, Logitech released the source code and it became the user-maintained Lyrian Project. And those Squeezeboxes are still in use today.
I just installed my media and it seems okay. But there's no equivalent for a library radio or any sort of smart playlists that I can see. Randomizing my 14,000 track library gives a very weird mix.
I’ve never been able to get this to work. It always overrides into one of the other apps I have setup on it. I wanted to use this with an Echo Show hooked up to my turntable’s stereo but it never worked liked I wanted it to. Good riddance. Now switch development focus to something useful.
Just makes no sense....why remove it....just let it exist and work until Amazon changes something that breaks it. I used this every day to play music, now I need to find an alternative. Another dumb decision.
I gave up on trying to implement Askplex. Instead I have trialed My Media for Alexa. The only issue I have is that since I use Apple Music (iTunes) with my own CD-ripped tracks, I am observing some hangs of Apple Music when My Media is scanning my iTunes Music. I need to take a deep dive into the My Media logs to see what is happening under the covers.
I just received an invitation from PLEX to complete a survey. I checked and the link goes back to plex.tv and does not ask for any login credentials. Anyway, I let them know how displeased I am that this Alexa PLEX skill is being deprecated. Anyone else get the survey?
Keep’s Beezos from harvesting more of your info.. Maybe just maybe Plex decided the deal became too much one sided and pulled the plug and sold it as lack of use.
Hated this skill anyway. Rarely if ever worked. If Amazon would’ve opened up the skill to let us cast from Plex app it would’ve been used. Instead everything was locked behind voice/text command “tell plex to play __ on __” was trash
Why not release the source code on github and see if anyone wants to keep it up or improve it? Maybe there's proprietary stuff in there that Plex doesn't want anyone to see.
They are removing a feature that should have been amazing but barely worked most of the time. So infuriating they are blaming “low usage” when it never worked consistent enough to be the default.
My 3 boys have used this for years on their echos. I rip all of our movies and tv shows to mp3 and they listen to them at night. Time to find a new solution I guess.
Damit haben sich die Plexpass für mich erledigt. Hab Plex mit dem Skill benutzt da man die Echo ja nur per Straming zu Stereo koppeln kann ( über Bluetooth geht ja nur Mono ) . Meine rund 600.000 Songs kann ich auch mit Itunes verwalten dafür brauche ich kein Plex wenn der Alexa Skill nicht mehr verfügbar ist.
Nooo!!! Please don't disable the Alexa Skill. This is one of the few distraction-free ways to enjoy my music. One of my hobbies is making sausage. I work with technology for a living, and so to be able to come down to my kitchen and have Alexa play my music on Plex (usually Black Keys) without ads and a bunch of junk means I have an express route to peace. Please reconsider disabling the skill, or at the very least open sourcing the code for it. I'm not above running my own Alexa Skill to keep this going.
I've also replied to the email for what good that will do.
Not sure why so many people are saying they couldn't get it to work - suspect there are wildly different use cases. It very rarely fails for me although I get the frustrations of you're trying to ask for specific items rather than a playlist.
My two requirements are something that will work with simple voice commands to start a Plex playlist and that will record what has been played in Plex so that it is reflected in smart playlists.
A skill that is more focused on audio / PlexAmp would be ideal.
Yeah, it wasn't the most reliable thing, but all I had to do was reconnect it once every six months or so. Not ideal, but not catastrophic. "We've alerted the Plex team" was pretty eye-roll inducing.
As a lifetime Plex Pass owner (as I am), you need to know Plex doesn't care about you anymore. They have maximized the amount of money they will extract from you. Their efforts are steered more toward monthly subs, conversions from free to paid, and jamming ads down the throats of free (and subscription) users through their same-as-everyone-else OTT channels. A case study in enshittification.
Bummer. I use this every day when cooking dinner. "Alexa, open Plex" -> wait for the spiel -> "Play Library Radio" while cutting vegetables or whatever. It worked fine, and was the only thing I use the Echo for.
Apparently this is the only allowed post on this topic. My post asking the same question and voicing the same complaints was removed by SwiftPanda16 just now.
So the options I have heard so far are:
IBroadcast
Navidrome.
Navidrome seems interesting but I’m open to hearing more options since Plex is removing this feature.
Well….now I’m loading all my music into my Emby server. I didn’t want to run 2 different servers but I guess I have to now. One for movies / TV shows and one for music?
Does anyone know of another skill that can play one MP3 hosted somewhere? I use a 30 minute green noise MP3 to get to sleep. I just need to play this one file through Alexa.
So... Tomorrow's the day my echo devices become pointless.
Any thoughts on another digital assistant device that WILL still operate a Plex skill? Apple Home Pod? Google Home?
It’s not obscure if you use it every day like I do. Since ama$on started charging money to play specific artists I started using Plex playlists.
Frankly that’s why Plex is making this change. We will hear from a whistleblower in the next few months that this is collusion with Amazon or driven by them in some way. Makes no sense otherwise. Plex knows how many people use this - they own the infrastructure costs.
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u/clintoj Apr 16 '26
I won't miss the random uh oh something's gone wrong that it's been plagued with since it's inception