@Russ brilliant! yes, I had made sendresult.sh executable previously. but the response change made parsing the result easier as you say. other stumbling blocks fixed:

• the trigger value in the shortcut configuration needed a "%20" instead of a space, as the command name had a space!
• the value for "computer" has to be the actual computer name in TriggerCMD, not laptop or maclaptop etc. (DUH).
• then what I needed in the first steps of the shortcut was this:

… etc. (you need to work with the variable "dictionary value" in this case.)

@Russ FYI, the ARM version (1.0.45) is now working. I had tried at least one update of the ARM version since I originally posted this, and it too crashed. given I was working with TC yesterday I tried again. whatever you did and whenever you did it, thanks.

@Russ I look forward to you getting it worked out. needless to say, thank you enormously for your contribution and continuing efforts.

I have both the Smart Home skill and the original Trigger Command skill installed. That hadn't been a problem, should it be?

I do of course have a specific use-case: much of what I want to do (such as getting info on the current music playing) requires the output, not just an on / off switch.

I wonder if it is possible to add that functionality to the new skill?

@Russ i think your Music app's player state is stopped. play a track, or play one and pause it, and it should work. (mine is never stopped :).

to test the basic functionality leave out the last pipe part (" | xargs" …), and run the rest in Terminal.

osascript -e 'tell application "Music" to set result to "This song is " & name of current track & " by " & artist of current track & " on the " & year of current track & " album " & album of current track' | sed 's/^/"/;s/$/"/'

as noted, this works for the "original" Alexa. Since I've been having problems with Alexa Plus and TriggerCMD, I was trying the Shortcuts route.

Recently upgrade to "Alexa Plus". now the "old" method command "alexa ask trigger command to run…" results in alexa saying:

"trigger command isn't supported on alexa plus yet. you can still access it on the alexa app under skills and games"

is this a known issue?

edit: apparently it sometimes works as expected, and sometimes doesn't (with above response)

hi -- how can this be used to display or say the result?

here's a command that works on alexa:

osascript -e 'tell application "Music" to set result to "This song is " & name of current track & " by " & artist of current track & " on the " & year of current track & " album " & album of current track' | sed 's/^/"/;s/$/"/' | xargs -I{} ~/.TRIGGERcmdData/sendresult.sh {}

when created with the QR code, the last step is "Get contents of TEXT". result: nothing. I added "Show result <contents of URL>" (defaults to that parameter). result: "no authorization header was found".

IMPORTANT NOTE on above

you must make the sendresult.sh bash script executable. go to terminal and:

cd ~/.TRIGGERcmdData/
chmod +x sendresult.sh

@Russ Hi. Thank you for attempting this. Sorry I had no email notifications turned on, so didn't get this until today.

Just tried it, there seem to be gatekeeper issues.

normally I can bypass this with a terminal command called xattr. However in this case even that doesn't work.

usually this has to do with lack of code signing the executable.

i reinstalled the x64 version and got this, which is expected, and after confirming it launched. note that I did not need to use xattr on this one, but maybe I had previously?

(Prior to this, today, while adding some new actions, it crashed more than once.)

I wanted Alexa to be able to report what is playing in (Apple) Music. I came up with these, which I am delighted to say, work:

WHAT ARTIST

osascript -e 'tell application "music" to set result to artist of current track' | sed 's/^/"/;s/$/"/' | xargs -I{} ~/.TRIGGERcmdData/sendresult.sh {}

Voice: what artist
Voice Reply: This artist is {{result}}

WHAT SONG

osascript -e 'tell application "Music" to set result to "This song is " & name of current track & " by " & artist of current track & " on the " & year of current track & " album " & album of current track' | sed 's/^/"/;s/$/"/' | xargs -I{} ~/.TRIGGERcmdData/sendresult.sh {}

Voice: what song
voice reply: {{result}}

Note: I'm not a terminal wiz, I'm not sure if this is the most efficient way to do this (happy for suggestions), but it works. the "sed" part is just to quote the result from "Music"

Of course you have to enable the Trigger Command Alexa skill. So you'd say:

"Alexa, ask Trigger Command to run What Song" or "…What Album"

BONUS: NEXT ALBUM

and now that I was on a roll, I tried something more complicated that needs to run an applescript file, playing a new album in the current playlist:

osascript ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Music/commands/next.album.scpt | sed 's/^/"/;s/$/"/' | xargs -I{} ~/.TRIGGERcmdData/sendresult.sh {}

voice: Next Album
voice reply: {{result}}

applescript:

tell application "Music"
	set rcount to 0
	set talb to album of current track
	repeat
		set rcount to rcount + 1
		next track
		set newalbum to album of current track
		set newartist to artist of current track
		if newalbum is not talb or rcount > 30 then exit repeat
	end repeat
	set result to "Playing " & newalbum & " by " & newartist
end tell

(saved as "next.album.scpt" and saved to path as given above. of course you can rename and/or change the path. the count is just a fail safe if album has too many tracks, can change of course)

@Russ thanks. i did not delete it. i came in hot as a newbie, made minimal changes. some error there, or maybe had to do with the crash.

also purely on a side note, I made the voice command "mac music" and it worked, to my surprise. Both Siri and Alexa are very aggressive in interpretting anything having to do with music (tunes, jukebox, songs, etc.) as an intent to play random shit from their poor cloud services.