Hi everyone, heres to report that I was successful.
In a nutshell i did exactly what @lucallmon recommended but for others to follow my procedures in order to fix this issue i will go step by step.
Initially I had installed AlexaPi on the raspberry pi 3 and during the installation process i was asked to name the platform. Since its a pi i selected “raspberrypi” which (looking back now) seemed to have caused the issue.
However as a first step I changed the Output handler from “vlc” to “sox” to see whether that would do the trick:
I opened the console and typed in
Sudo nano /etc/opt/AlexaPi/config.yaml
Under the 4th paragraph there is the line “playback_handler: “vlc””
I changed “vlc” to read “sox”
(At this stage i saved, restarted and noticed that i could run magic mirror and alexa would also respond but the mic icon was still crossed out so i went back to config.yaml again and continued as follows)
Furthermore the device named in the config file was still “raspberrypi” and i wanted to change that too.
So wherever I saw the words "device: “raspberrypi” i changed that simply to “device: “magicmirror””
I changed 4 entries in total:
- In the “sound” paragraph in the very beginning (line 3 of the paragraph),
- in the paragraph following the playback_handler (line 4 of the paragraph ) “# output device:…”
- 2 paragraphs below that (line 1 of the paragraph ) "# some device:…#
- and finally towards the bottom theres a paragraph called “Platform” (line 2 of the paragraph )
After changing those lines I hit ctrl, x confirmed to save the file with yes and confirmed the file name with enter.
I rebooted the pi and started up magic mirror and now everything is working!!!
One thing to note though is that the changing from “vlc” to “sox” in my case caused alexa not to greet me with “hello” upon startup anymore. But since everything else seems to be working now I can live with that.
Hope this helps everyone who encounters a similar problem. Thanks again for all the tips!
Best regards / Dave