OVOS Common Play is a full-fledged voice media player packaged as a mycroft audio plugin.

OCP handles the whole voice integration and playback functionality, it also integrates with external players via MPRIS

Skills provide search results, think about them as media providers/catalogs for OCP

You can find OCP skills in the awesome-ocp-skills list

mycroft.conf

{
  "Audio": {
    "backends": {
      "local": {
        "type": "ovos_common_play",
        "active": true
      },
      "simple": {
        "type": "ovos_audio_simple",
        "active": true
      }
    },
    "default-backend": "local"
  }
}

Normally OCP is initialized and started by ovos-audio.

However, in some situations you may want to run OCP in standalone mode.

For example, when running Hivemind Core with Hivemind Satellites, you want to run OCP at the Core, not the Satellite. You cannot run OCP on the satellite because it cannot register its intents. So you want to run OCP in standalone mode near to the Core.

How you do this depends on your setup. This packages provides the console script ovos-ocp-standalone. So running in standalone mode could be as simple as:

pip install ovos-plugin-common-play
ovos-ocp-standalone

It will read the configuration from ~/.config/mycroft/mycroft.conf just like all other OVOS applications.