House Band

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House Band allows you to control JRiver Media Center music collection with your voice! Play music, search your collection, create Play Doctor playlists, and more.

To use House Band, you'll need a copy of JRiver Media Center running on your home network (the same network that Alexa is connected to.)
You must have JRiver set up as a media server, and have it be accessible from outside your home network (Note: this might require you to enable port forwarding.)

What's New?
- Tag Search
- Classical Search
- Video Search
- New Help Topics



Here's the basic setup:

PLAY MUSIC (Music commands work best when you start with the word "play")
"Play the album [album name]"
"Play the song [song name]"
"Play the song [song name] by [artist name]"
"Play the album [album name] by [artist name]"
"Play songs by [artist name]"
"Play [anything]" - queue up everything with that string.


Many of the above commands will produce a list of matching results. For example, after asking

"Play the album Kind of Blue."

Alexa might say:

"I found two matching items. Heres what you have. Miles Davis, Kind of Blue. Miles Davis, Kind of Blue (SACD). What should I play?"

You can the select from the list:
"Select the SACD"
or,
"Play all"

CLASSICAL:
Classical searches require using the keywords "piece" or "composer" in your search.

"Play the piece Gymnopedie by Satie."
"Play Symphony #9 by the composer Beethoven."

TAG Search:
"Play all music with the following tags: genre is jazz, artist is Miles Davis"

"Do a tag search for genre Baroque, instrument Flute"

Note: searches for genre, instrument, style (e.g., sonata, leider, etc), period (baroque, classical, etc) require your music to be properly tagged.

VIDEO:
"Play the movie Die Hard."
"Play Season 1 of Seinfeld."
"Play Episode 4, Season 2, of the Simpsons."

For more information on HouseBand searches:

Tag and String search: "Ask HouseBand for help with Tag Searches"
Classical Search" "Ask HouseBand for help with Classical Search."
Video Search: "Ask HouseBand for help with Video Search."


PLAYLISTS:
"Play my/the [playlist name] playlist"
"Play the/my playlist [playlist name]"
"Add the [song name/album name/search string] to the playlist
"Create a [artist name, genre, keyword] playlist" - creates a PlayDoctor playlist. For example:

"Create a jazz playlist."
"Create a Bruce Springsteen playlist."


CONTROLS:
"Pause" / "Stop the music"
"Resume" - continues playback.
"Next song/next track/skip this/next/thumbs down”
"Previous"/ "Go back"
"Change the / set the volume to [1-10]"
"Volume up / down / louder / quieter”


QUERIES:
"Whats playing?"
"What do I have by [artist name]?"


ZONES:
"What are my zones?" / What zones do I have?" - will give you a list of zones
"Change the zone to [zone name]" - changes the current zone. (Note: it doesn't transfer the currently playing music to new zone.)