Ear Wax Is Now Live

[MarvinB 5]

Ear Wax is now live in the Amazon Alexa Skill Store!

After months of development and beta testing, Ear Wax is officially available.

Ear Wax lets you use voice commands to play your own personal music library on Alexa-enabled speakers, with support for Plex and Emby.

To get started:

• Find and enable Ear Wax in the Amazon Alexa Skill Store.

• Follow the setup guide here:

https://ear-wax-config.marvinbrown9999.workers.dev/

Once configured, you’re ready to start using Ear Wax with your Alexa-enabled devices.

A big thank-you to everyone who helped test Ear Wax, reported problems, shared ideas, and provided feedback during development. Your help made a real difference.

Ear Wax is live. Give it a try, and let me know how it works with your setup.

— Marvin

[ginjaninja 652]

Hi @MarvinB
Congratulations on your release and thank you for sharing.

Setup worked first time for me. As well as a comforting success message on albums, playlists etc, I got an ominous "Emby did not respond quickly enough to some items" to the command "Alexa, ask Ear Wax provider status". I cant get to the bottom of why emby [rest api] is sometimes super speedy to respond and sometimes it is glacial for certain queries - but thats not an Ear Wax issue.

the setup page returned an inconsequential warning "Unexpected token '<', "<!DOCTYPE "... is not valid JSON". didnt seem to affect anything.

I love the "what is playing" feature.

Do you share a roadmap of whats next on your mind for  Ear Wax, I would love to see "Play track" support, for when i just want to play a track and i cant rememeber who it is by.

I wasnt clear from your setup guide where the intended place to ask support queries was?

[MarvinB 5]

On 7/27/2026 at 3:17 AM, ginjaninja said:

Hi @MarvinB
Congratulations on your release and thank you for sharing.

Setup worked first time for me. As well as a comforting success message on albums, playlists etc, I got an ominous "Emby did not respond quickly enough to some items" to the command "Alexa, ask Ear Wax provider status". I cant get to the bottom of why emby [rest api] is sometimes super speedy to respond and sometimes it is glacial for certain queries - but thats not an Ear Wax issue.

the setup page returned an inconsequential warning "Unexpected token '<', "<!DOCTYPE "... is not valid JSON". didnt seem to affect anything.

I love the "what is playing" feature.

Do you share a roadmap of whats next on your mind for  Ear Wax, I would love to see "Play track" support, for when i just want to play a track and i cant rememeber who it is by.

I wasnt clear from your setup guide where the intended place to ask support queries was?

Hi Ginjaninja,

Sorry for the late response. Since you and I have communicated numerous times via email, you are free to email me regarding Ear Wax and any problems you come across. 

Play track support is there and part of Ear Wax Core/Basic. The command is Alexa, Ask Ear Wax to play track ???? by Artist ????

I've attach the development roadmap 

Road Map.xlsx

[Arinoth 0]

I've been trying to set this up, following the setup guide however I keep getting this error when I test the connection: Ear Wax reached the Emby address, but Emby returned HTTP 403 during the server test.

[MarvinB 5]

On 8/18/2026 at 9:52 AM, Arinoth said:

I've been trying to set this up, following the setup guide however I keep getting this error when I test the connection: Ear Wax reached the Emby address, but Emby returned HTTP 403 during the server test.

Hello, 

I have sent you an email that has a link to the whatsapp Ear Wax Support chat. This way I can get you up and running faster. If you determine that your issue is not that urgent then we can continue using emails to communicate.

 

Thank you

[Sicarian 0]

I too am getting Ear Wax reached the Emby address, but Emby returned HTTP 403 during the server test message. Any assistance is appreciated.

[MarvinB 5]

10 hours ago, Sicarian said:

I too am getting Ear Wax reached the Emby address, but Emby returned HTTP 403 during the server test message. Any assistance is appreciated.

I sent you a message, please respond to the email in that message.

 

Thank you,

 

Marvin

[Swaf 2]

sad i can't found it in french alexa store !

[MarvinB 5]

8 hours ago, Swaf said:

sad i can't found it in french alexa store !

yes it is sad.. but there are possibilities...

If your english is good I can give you access to the beta and you can at least try it out.

Right now, I am working on sound-leveling with French language availability next on the list

If you like the beta, you can assist me with the migration to French language and that is a win for both of us.

Let me know your thoughts.

 

thank you

[mbrundridge 0]

I got it configured and it reported it found the user and media library.  But when I ask alexa to have ear wax play some music, as soon as it trys to hand off it reports "Sorry I had trouble finding music in your library".

 

Don't know if this is a Wmby config issue or what.  I used to use the Plex service till it was disabled.  Then switched to Emby and trying to get it to play my music on Alexa devices.

 

Edited Sunday at 06:08 AM by mbrundridge

[Swaf 2]

14 hours ago, MarvinB said:

yes it is sad.. but there are possibilities...

If your english is good I can give you access to the beta and you can at least try it out.

Right now, I am working on sound-leveling with French language availability next on the list

If you like the beta, you can assist me with the migration to French language and that is a win for both of us.

Let me know your thoughts.

 

thank you

Sadly wife and kid use it too so i can’t :[

[MarvinB 5]

4 hours ago, mbrundridge said:

I got it configured and it reported it found the user and media library.  But when I ask alexa to have ear wax play some music, as soon as it trys to hand off it reports "Sorry I had trouble finding music in your library".

 

Don't know if this is a Wmby config issue or what.  I used to use the Plex service till it was disabled.  Then switched to Emby and trying to get it to play my music on Alexa devices.

 

I sent you a message.. 

Also, please tell me your location.. England, United States East Coast.. 

Thank you

[AgostinoMedia 6]

I was able to get plex set up, but because i use two different libraries and i can't choose a specific library in ear wax settings, i am trying to connect to my emby because i have just one set up for it. i enter my email, emby api key that i created in API Keys, and my emby username. i get the following error:

Emby server reached: <servername omitted here>, but user validation returned HTTP 500.

what am i doing wrong?

Edited 12 hours ago by AgostinoMedia

[MarvinB 5]

5 hours ago, AgostinoMedia said:

I was able to get plex set up, but because i use two different libraries and i can't choose a specific library in ear wax settings, i am trying to connect to my emby because i have just one set up for it. i enter my email, emby api key that i created in API Keys, and my emby username. i get the following error:

Emby server reached: <servername omitted here>, but user validation returned HTTP 500.

what am i doing wrong?

Thanks. I think I may see the issue.

Ear Wax requires your Emby User ID, not your Emby username/display name. On the Ear Wax setup page, this is the field labeled Emby User ID, with the instruction to enter the ID rather than the display name.

Can you confirm whether you entered your actual Emby User ID in that field, or your Emby username?

If you entered the username, please replace it with the User ID and try the connection again. If you already entered the User ID and are still getting HTTP 500, let me know and I'll investigate the validation failure further.

[AgostinoMedia 6]

2 hours ago, MarvinB said:

Thanks. I think I may see the issue.

Ear Wax requires your Emby User ID, not your Emby username/display name. On the Ear Wax setup page, this is the field labeled Emby User ID, with the instruction to enter the ID rather than the display name.

Can you confirm whether you entered your actual Emby User ID in that field, or your Emby username?

If you entered the username, please replace it with the User ID and try the connection again. If you already entered the User ID and are still getting HTTP 500, let me know and I'll investigate the validation failure further.

 

You're right MarvinB, I was using the display name and not the actual user id which I discovered is the string of letters and numbers in my url when viewing the emby dashboard. I was able to successfully connect this time. Thank you. I have not yet tested "ask provider status" but will play around it with it later and possibly even compare the experience between emby and plex as well. I was getting very tired and frustrated with the stock Emby skill and how it would play the same thing all the time haha. thanks again for this skill!

[AgostinoMedia 6]

Okay well asking ear wax provider status worked once for emby and when I asked it to play music it would not play from emby however. But Amazon. Ear wax play some music.

 

Then I tried my plex, it connects on the setup page but when I ask ear wax provider status my device gives me a “not sure how to help you with that”.

[MarvinB 5]

21 minutes ago, AgostinoMedia said:

Okay well asking ear wax provider status worked once for emby and when I asked it to play music it would not play from emby however. But Amazon. Ear wax play some music.

 

Then I tried my plex, it connects on the setup page but when I ask ear wax provider status my device gives me a “not sure how to help you with that”.

This is a stupid Alexa behavior.. so to get around it, what I have found that works is the following

Tell Alexa, open Ear Wax

After Ear Wax responds  with What would you like to hear, Say Ask Ear Wax to play some music... 

You should be good to go. You should only have to do this, Open Ear Wax,  ONE time

Btw, Amazon is looking into this issue on why Alexa is hijacking the command and sending it a music provider.

You can also try to disable and reenable the skill.

Please tell me your location. I am in the U.S. and this rarely happens to me.

Keep me informed

[AgostinoMedia 6]

I tried what you said and what it does is it plays music from amazon music instead. I'm going to try again from scratch, i disabled and re-enabled the skill, I reconfigured my plex credentials on the ear wax config web page, i'll test that out. If that works, I might still test it with Emby to see if that works too. I'll let you know today. I'm in Canada btw.

[AgostinoMedia 6]

No it just doesn’t work for either anymore. Alexa just doesn’t know how to help me with that haha

[MarvinB 5]

@AgostinoMedia;

 

Please answer the following;

Do you have any success with Plex?

Do you have any success with Emby?

For the failures that you encounter, what messsage are you getting?

If you are getting amazon music or a message something like I don't know how to help you with that, that is an Alexa problem.. If you get a message saying that I cant locate the media in you library that is an Ear Wax config problem, THAT I can fix.

 

Please answer my questions and we can go from there.

 

Thanks

 

[MarvinB 5]

@AgostinoMedia

 

is the email address you have for plex the same for emby?