A bit OT, but what kind of use do things like Amazon Echo have if you cant even use your own music library (for free)?
I was thinking of buying one for my wife, but then found out that, as long as you dont have those songs from Amazon Music (Yeah. Amazon Music surely has my ripped Chinese and Taiwanese songs....) , you can only upload 250 songs to the Amazon Cloud from your own library and if you want more, you have to pay 2€ monthly...
As far as having to spend money for music to work very simply I feel that. If you're not paying and have rare collections, you can connect to Echo with bluetooth. Vocal commands for stop, play, pause, next track, skip ahead, and volume levels all work. I use those all the time.
I also use it to set timers, reminders (those ping your phone when they're due, too), control the thermostat and just ordered plugs that it can control as well. "Echo, play the news," gets me the hourly NPR brief and another NPR show after, whenever I want. Many podcasts recent episode are available and can be conjured on demand as well.
The system hooked me in pretty far, as you might guess. For gags, I put my Aunt's Echo on my phone so I can start playing joke songs in her house whenever I want.
I remembered, I used to have it play live radio over the internet, but grew out of that habit. It was kind of cool though to get good "reception" locally, and then check into live NY hip hop radio, and then live UK radio in a flash.
