AskSonic

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.

Features

• 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
• List albums by artist
  • Ask sub sonic to list Yellowcard albums

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.

Planned Features

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

Setup

AskSonic can easily run alongside your Subsonic server. Once it's running, you'll need to Create the Alexa skill

Configuring the Subsonic server

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.

Running locally

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

Creating the Alexa Skill

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 your preferred language's interaction model (English: en.json). Then select Save Model. Check all available languages here
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.
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

Configuration

Variable	Description	Required
ASKS_SUBSONIC_URL	The base URL of your Subsonic-compatible music server. Must be https. Example: https://subdomain.example.com	✅
ASKS_SUBSONIC_USER	Your Subsonic server username	✅
ASKS_SUBSONIC_PASS	Your Subsonic server password	✅
ASKS_SUBSONIC_PORT	The port your Subsonic server listens on (if not the default for https)	Default: 443
ASKS_SUBSONIC_SERVERPATH	The server path of your Subsonic server. Must contain only the path, not the domain. Example: /path/to/rest	Default: /rest
ASKS_SUBSONIC_APIVERSION	The supported API version of your Subsonic server. (Airsonic servers should use version 1.15.0)	Default: 1.16.1
ASKS_SUBSONIC_APPNAME	The name of your AskSonic instance	Default: py-sonic
ASKS_HOST	The host AskSonic's server will listen on	Default: 0.0.0.0
ASKS_PORT	The port AskSonic's server will listen on	Default: 4545 or $PORT
ASKS_ROUTE_PREFIX	The endpoint that Alexa will use to communicate with AskSonic. You can obscure your AskSonic instance by customizing this	Default: /alexa
ASKS_TRACKS_COUNT	The number of tracks enqueued at a time	Default: 50
ASKS_EXTRA_SECRET	An extra secret that will be appended to all requests as either a header or to the query string. Useful for authenticating requests if your Subsonic server is behind a WAF such as Cloudflare	❌

Acknowledgements

AskSonic was inspired by the following projects:

• Geemusic
• Sublexa
• Flask-Ask

AskSonic recommends the following Subsonic-compatible music server:

• Navidrome

License

AskSonic is licensed under the MIT License.