Alexa, Harmony and SONOS Can Play MusicBee Playlists

[jacktheripper]

This may be obvious to some, but it is straightforward to set up Alexa to launch a Harmony Activity, which in turn can group SONOS zones, set their initial volumes and then initiate play on a queue in one of the zones. That queue can point to your local music, as opposed to a service, if you want. The only caveat is that the queue must already contain the music you want to play, but under some circumstances, that's OK. Here's why:

We have a SONOS playlist called Dinner Music with about 200 songs. All the songs were ripped from CDs, and are on a memory stick hanging off my router as a NAS. In another post (here) I described how I use MusicBee to curate that music.

 I loaded that playlist into a rarely used SONOS zone (Pool), and leave it there. I created a Harmony activity called My Dinner Music, and when I say "Alexa, play My Dinner Music" that activity is run by the Harmony Hub.

The Harmony Activity sets up a group of four SONOS zones, three we want to hear (Living Room, Kitchen and Media Room), with the fourth zone being the Pool. The Activity sets the initial volume of the Pool to zero, and the other three volumes balanced as we like to hear them. The Media Room SONOS plays through my Denon amplifier, and that's turned on and configured by the Activity as well.

All this setup is reflected in the SONOS app on my iPhone, and I use this app to tweak things further, if I want. After dinner, I can say "Alexa, turn off My Dinner Music", and all zones go quiet. The Pool zone just pauses the current song, but does not empty its queue, ready to go for tomorrow.