AskSonic is an Alexa skill to play music from Subsonic API compatible music servers. It's powered by Flask-Ask and the Flask Python web framework.

• Shuffle music from your library
  • Ask sub sonic to play my library
• Play music from an artist
  • Ask sub sonic to play music by Deftones
• Play an album
  • Ask sub sonic to play the album Morning View by Incubus
• Current track information
  • Ask sub sonic what song this is
  • Ask sub sonic what album this song is from
• Star tracks
  • Tell sub sonic to star this song
  • Tell sub sonic to star the last song

Standard playback controls (Alexa: Pause, Resume, Previous, Next, etc.) can be used without using the skill's name. AskSonic will scrobble tracks with the server after they finish playing.

• Play specific songs, playlists
• Add specific songs to the play queue via interactive search

AskSonic can easily run in a free Heroku dyno, or run alongside your Subsonic server. Once it's running, you'll need to Create the Alexa skill

It's recommended to use a non-admin user as we will be storing the login credentials in AskSonic's configuration. Consider how your Subsonic server handles play counts, starred tracks, playlists, etc. to decide if you want to create a new user account or use your existing one. You may want to configure transcoding for this user/player as Alexa has limited file-type support.

1. Create a Heroku account and login
2. Click the button above
3. Choose a name for your app. You may want to add random characters to the name to obfuscate your app's URL
4. Fill in the configuration variables. See Configuration for further details
5. Click Deploy app. Once deployment completes, click View and copy the URL

If you instead prefer to host the AskSonic server yourself, you can follow these steps:

1. Clone the repository and install requirements: pip install -r requirements.txt. AskSonic requires Python 3.9+
2. Copy .env.example to .env and fill it in. See Configuration for further details
3. Install foreman (Either the Gem or the Node version)
4. You can start the server with foreman start. If you would like to run the server in debug mode, you can use the Procfile.dev instead
5. Your AskSonic server will need to be publicly accessible over https with a valid certificate. The best option is to use a reverse proxy such as Caddy with a certificate from Let's Encrypt

1. Visit the Alexa Console and select Create Skill. Use the same Amazon account that is logged in to your Alexa-powered device
2. Enter a name for your skill (this doesn't affect how you invoke the skill from Alexa). Select Custom for the model and Provision your Own for the backend. Select Start from Scratch for the skill template
3. Once the skill is created, from the skill menu, select Interaction Model -> JSON Editor and paste in the contents of interactionModel.json. Then select Save Model
4. Select Invocation from the menu. Here you can adjust how you invoke the skill from within Alexa
5. Select Endpoint from the menu. Change to HTTPS and enter the URL to your AskSonic instance under Default Region. If you customized ASKS_ROUTE_PREFIX, add that to the end of the URL, otherwise add /alexa. Select the SSL certificate type. If you used Heroku this will be My development endpoint is a sub-domain [...]
6. Select Interfaces from menu. Enable the Audio Player interface
7. Select Save Model and Build Model

Important: Do not publish the skill as that would allow anyone to access your Subsonic server and potentially retrieve the login credentials

AskSonic was inspired by the following projects:

• Geemusic
• Sublexa
• Flask-Ask

AskSonic recommends the following Subsonic-compatible music server:

• Navidrome

AskSonic is licensed under the MIT License.