Control Squeezebox (LMS) with Alexa via OpenHAB?

As I’m slowly getting started with OpenHAB, it occurs to me that I might be able to control my Squeezebox players (Logitech Media Server) with Alexa (Amazon) through OpenHAB. I haven’t been able to confirm this, though. Could someone clarify?

Here is what I found out so far:

The binding for LMS allows at least some limited playback functionality, i.e. it can play certain favourites.

There is a binding for Alexa that seems to support playing media.

But I’m not sure if and how (or under what conditions) these two can interact…

For me it is not clear what you want to achive with this?

Do you want to control your LMS Player with Alexa? So play a track or pause a track. Then I think you will not need any openhab server for this. There are special alexa skills for LMS available (I hav enot tested them, only searched for them right now)

But of course you can also use the LMS binding and expose the channels to Alexa. Then you only need to expose the needed items and add the alexa tags so that they will arrive in the alexa app (of course you need to configure the alexa binding before).

You can then play, pause etc the speakers. But I think you are limited when you want to play specific playlists. Therefore you will need a rule and e.g. a switch for each playlist. Then you can just say “alexa turn playlist XY on”. This will turn the switch on and in your rule you can then translate this to a uri or playlist id

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Those skills are great but they require me to drill a tunnel into my home network to my media server. Opening my media server to the WAN, in turn requires, I believe, that I enable password protection for my LMS and since password protection can only be enabled or disabled (not: enabled for WAN and disabled for LAN), this makes accessing the LMS a huge hassle. Too much of a hassle for the limited functionality I’m looking for.

So I thought: if OpenHAB can do this without me fiddling with SSH tunnels and what not, that would be great.

So, thanks for your answer. I will look deeper into this as soon as I can. “alexa, turn on playlist XY” is exactly what I need.

Just to be sure: this also works with OH3 milestone 3?

Yes, both bindings are already available in the OH3 M3 release so no issue with that.

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I’m not finding the Amazon Alexa Smart Home Skill

Just saw that milestone 5 has meanwhile been released. Should I still stick to M3 or is M5 OK?

The username and password for the tunnel are only for the tunnel itself and are different to the LMS username and password. You should not set a local username and password on LMS to use those skills.