Being able to repeat sounds and songs (via Amazon’s “loop mode”) on your Amazon Echo devices is a really useful feature – it can save you money (compared to paying monthly subscriptions for “premium music” on third party white noise skills), and it’s also useful for parties, night-time or where you simply love a new song!
However it’s not always obvious how to do enable Amazon Alexa’s loop mode on your Echo devices – especially how to loop playlists and songs/playlists within routines.
As a result, I wanted to shoot this video and explain how you can repeat one-off songs, how you can loop playlists, and also how you can (sort of) keep repeating songs/playlists that you can triggered within your Alexa automation routines.
Video Transcript
Hey YouTube, I’m Tristan from Smart Home Point. One of the things you can do on your Echo devices and in the Alexa app is loop music. This can be used for a number of purposes. For example you can loop a particular song if you… if it’s a favorite song, and you can listen to it on repeat… which will probably drive everyone else around a bit nutty, but it could be good to do! Equally if you have a party, you might not want to play a random Spotify playlist just in case weird songs come up. So what you can do is put a playlist together of your 10 or 15 – or 100 – favorite songs, and play that playlist on repeat, and that’s a good way of controlling the music you’ve got. Finally you can actually loop music as part of a routine, and this is good because if you have a bedtime routine, you can actually build this looping of music into the routine so you can then play that music on repeat all through the night, and this is particularly good for sleep music or sleep sounds. And it’s also good considering a lot of the third party skills on the Echo platform that play sleep sounds have recently started charging per month for their “premium sounds”, which is a bit rubbish, so I wanted to film this video and just walk through how you can do these three things: loop songs, looping of playlists and looping music as part of a routine. Let’s take a look.
Okay so if you’ve got a particular favorite song you want to keep playing over and over then it’s really easy: you just request the song, and then afterwards you say ‘loop mode’ on. So for example you say play Baby Shark. “Playing Baby Shark from your library on Amazon Music”. And then you simply say loop mode on. “Loop mode”. Let’s mute that down now, uhm, because this is a copyrighted song so I don’t actually wanna play this on this YouTube channel. But um, this song’s playing now and it’ll just keep playing over and over, Uhm, and at any point you want to stop this you can either just literally say the command word and then stop, or if you want to keep listening to the song you can literally turn loop mode off by saying: “loop mode off”. “Loop mode off”. to stop. Okay, so that’s really easy and as I say – if you’ve got a particular favorite song, this is really easy to do, and it works really well.
Okay next up is looping a playlist. Now this works really well, especially if you’re having a party or anything else and you just want some mood, um, music in the background. You can arrange your playlist in the Amazon Music app, which is shown on the screen now. It’s… this is fairly easy to do, and then once you have your playlist, you can ask your Echo device to play that playlist. At that point, you can then ask to loop that playlist in the same way as you loop a song, and it’s really easy to do. Let’s have a look. Play my relaxation playlist. “Your playlist relaxation on Amazon Music”. [Me] “loop mode on”, [Alexa] “loop mode on”. Okay and it’ll literally now keep repeating over and over – obviously other than the fact that I’ve muted it! But um I’ll keep playing over and over on loop for this particular playlist, and it’ll work fine if you’ve got a single song in your playlist, or 100 songs – it’ll just keep playing over and over. So this method is really easy to do, and it works really well as well.
Right, one of the things I really like with the Amazon app – smart home app – is just how easy it is to actually create automation routines, and as part of this you can obviously play songs and you can play playlists. Now there is a flaw with this because you can’t actually loop directly on the playlist, which I’ll show you now, but there is thankfully a bit of a workaround. Uhm, so to create a routine you’re gonna go to more, and then go to routines here. What I’ll do is… is just create a new one up in the corner here. I’ll call it ‘relax’, then I’ll create just a simple bedtime routine. So when this happens… when someone says the phrase relax… then we want things to happen, and obviously you’ve got quite of choice of stuff that can happen, um, which is quite handy. What I’ll do here firstly is go to smart home, lights and say bedroom… color want to make sure it’s – sort of – a warm white, which is good for nighttime. Click on next, and then we want to actually play a song as part of this routine. So we click on add new, go down to music, and here… you can actually type in what you want to play. So for example I could say baby shark. Uhm, and over here I can select a provider: so I say Amazon Music. And that works really well, however there’s a bit of a flaw because if I said ‘on loop’… next… it says it can’t find any results. Uhm, and the same is true as well of a playlist. So if I, uhm, select a playlist such as my relaxation playlist my relaxation – playlist, and click on next, that will work actually. I’ll just make sure it says for my library… shouldn’t make any difference… but there we are, so that works fine. So that would work, but then the moment I say ‘on loop’ it doesn’t work. Or ‘on repeat’, it also doesn’t work.
And trust me, I’ve played around with this a lot, so I won’t go into every sort of combination. Uhm, but just trust me when I say it doesn’t work unfortunately. I’ve even tried doing things like this… so adding a new one and then saying “loop mode on” on my library. I’ve even tried that, and it seems like it’ll actually work because it’s actually saved it, doesn’t give me an error, but then… from the device you speak to… so click save up there, so I’ve even done that. But then when I actually go and play this particular routine – you know – so when I actually go to an Echo device and I say “relax”, when it says that it’ll play whatever playlist I’ve asked it to play, but then at the end of that it seems to get confused when you say something like this, and it’ll just say something like… “playing your music in shuffle mode”, which isn’t very useful! Uhm, so it is a bit of a flaw: so it means that at the moment you can’t actually loop songs or loop playlists as part of a routine. But you can do if I just delete that and go back out. What you can do is go to your Echo device, say the word – the trigger point of your command – of your routine, and then say ‘loop mode on’, and that will then work, as I’ll show you now. So let’s take a look at that.
[Me] “Relax”. Okay so that’s playing, and now that that’s playing, whether it’s a playlist or a song, has been kicked off by the routine, but now because it’s playing I can literally just ask for loop mode to be turned on. [me] “loop mode on”. [Alexa] “loop mode on”. So as you can see loop mode is on, and whether it’s a playlist or a song that you kicked off by a routine, they’ll now keep playing over and over on repeat, which is great especially at night for – sort of – white noise and sleep relaxation noise and music. Uhm, whilst it’s a bit of a pain you can’t turn loop mode on as part of the routine, this is a fairly – you know – easy way of doing it anyway because you issue the command for your playlist… for your routine, sorry… you’ll do all the things in that particular routine, and then you literally have to just say the command word and “loop mode on” and then you’ve got that song – or the set of songs – repeating all throughout the night. So it works out fairly well in my opinion.
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