New Sounds, produced at the WNYC/WQXR studios, is "A daily showcase of weird and wonderful music from artists, composers and traditional musicians — all gleefully oblivious of their genres." It's an excellent resource for learning about music and performers that American radio stations don't (or didn't) often play. Each episode is centered around playing examples which meet that day's theme, ranging from historic to ultramodern, traditional to avant-garde, soloists to orchestras. There have been over 4500 unique episodes since the early 1980s, with new ones still being added, and most of them can now be played from the station's servers. This skill lets Alexa-family smart speakers access those archives, selecting them by broadcast date or episode number or asking for oldest/newest/random. To get some idea of what this skill can do, ask Alexa to "Open New Sounds On Demand" -- that will interactively suggest some of the supported actions and ask which one you want. You can also say "Alexa, tell New Sounds On Demand to..." followed by any of the commands. We support many (but certainly not all) synonyms for these commands, so go ahead and try whatever phrasing is most natural for you and we'll try to make it work. For example, you can say "... Play episode four thousand and three" or "I want to hear show forty oh three" or "Give me four oh oh three, please" and they'll all do the same thing. Examples of our command set in this first release: "Alexa, open New Sounds On Demand" -- Enters interactive mode, where the skill reminds you of some of the things it can do and asks you to pick one. "Alexa, ask New Sounds On Demand to..." followed by any of the other commands skips the "what do you want to do" interaction and immediately executes the command. "... Play the newest episode." -- Play the episode most recently broadcast in the daily radio program. "... Play the oldest episode." -- Play the episode from the earliest broadcast date we have in the database. "... Play the highest episode." -- Play the show with the highest episode number, which will be the one that was _produced_ (as opposed to broadcast) most recently. KNOWN BUG: If you say "highest numbered", that *should* work, but currently the skill often gets confused and asks you which number to play. If that happens, just say "highest" again and it'll understand you. "... Play the lowest-numbered show." -- Play Episode 1, the first episode to be nationally syndicated. New Sounds actually launched several years before that, but right now this is about as far back as our archives can reach. "... Play episode four thousand and two." -- Select a specific episode number. Since the numbers are announced during the show, this is the most reliable way to make a note of a show you might want to come back to. "... Play the show from last Thursday." -- Select a show by date. Alexa accepts most phrasings of dates, but has a bad habit of interpreting them as meaning the *next* date which matches that description unless you say "last" or give the full date. If you say something that Alexa thinks is in the future, the skill will ask you to rephrase the request, since we can only play shows from today or earlier. "... Pick a random show." -- Surprise yourself. (In fact "Surprise me" is one of the synonyms for this.) "... Play the live stream." -- 24-hour continuous new-music programming, covering just about anything that might appear on New Sounds. Twice a day, that includes an actual episode of the show, otherwise minimal talking. "... Roll the credits." -- one of several ways to ask who brings us New Sounds, and who developed this Skill. Once the audio is playing, you can use many of Alexa's standard playback controls -- next and previous (by date), stop/pause, resume/continue, restart (rewind to start of this recording). WARNING: If you stop late in a recording, ask Alexa to do other things, and then resume Alexa may take a long time to figure out where she stopped.
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