Quote:
Originally Posted by darryl
This is a deliberate policy of Amazon. Apparently they used to permit upload of songs to their cloud via I think a Windows Desktop program. However, this functionality was removed, as I recall before the introduction of Alexa. Alexa can also access only Audible Audiobooks. The walled garden is indeed alive and well. There are some third party skills which may circumvent this. I tried one of them a while ago and the results were not particularly satisfactory, though things may have improved since then and/or more suitable skills may now be available. I like Amazon music and Audible. However, believe it or not, there are some songs not available on Amazon Music which it would be nice to be able to upload. Likewise, Audible is great for Audiobooks, but it would be nice to be able to listen to, say, Overdrive Audiobooks on Alexa as well. But I'm not holding my breath!
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Alexa also sucks with podcasts. I can find and play a podcast on my iThingies in less than a minute. With Alexa, it takes forever, and usually results in my giving up and playing the podcast on my MacBook Pro. The native podcast skill is bad, and none of the 3rd party ones I've tried are very good either.
As far as my locally saved song files, I long since gave up on trying to play them via Alexa. Again, it is much easier and quicker just to put on a headset and tell Siri to play them. Apple has its walled garden too, though their walled garden is more for security, but at least they know how to give decent access to personal music files and podcasts.