The Alexa gift and ongoing puzzles

It's a funny old world and here I am trying to re-purpose my old blog! I've just spent absolutely ages deleting all the old entries, so that I can (more or less) start afresh.

Apart from the usual church-free christmas, which is the normal and usual way of things for me, I got one rather unusual and unexpected gift. A good friend bought me an Alexa Echoed Plus and I've spent about a week messing around with it. I've discovered that my main use for it turns out to be as a wireless loudspeaker! It's ironic, because (as I understand it) this electronic device is mainly used as a means of driving other devices (and not the other way around). As far as I can make out, configuring in and using a Bluetooth transmitter as a means of playing the output of your MP3 player, through the Alexa speaker, is an undocumented function.

I got too clever for my own good, a couple of days ago and tried using the very same transmitter in conjunction with another kind of receiver. I then discovered that the Alexa unit could no longer locate the transmitter. It took me awhile to realise that there was quite possibly a command that got Alexa to go looking for existing Bluetooth devices, and this worked!

I know I can play stuff from my Audible library on this unit, but there isn't a viable way of doing the same thing with audiobooks in MP3 format, not that I've been able to find (so far), although I've only been hunting around for a few days! I'm not surprised that Amazon want to try and shut out other sound formats as much as possible, so was to retain their jealously guarded exclusivity. There are normally weighs around Amazon's attempts at generating a monopoly, but they are not all that easy to find (in my experience).