Sonos in Car

So your suggesting a wifi based, hardware based speaker system should be portable? I'm not sure that's what many people bought their Sonis system for.

You have plenty of alternatives. Set up a NAS, use Plex and your music is available wherever you go, as long as your NAS is on.

Use Spotify.

Use iTunes for your playlists.

But don't expect Sonos to become am external streaming service.

The Sonos app is a remote control, and doesn’t play music at all.  Playlists are stored on the Sonos speakers, not the app.  

Never going to happen. The suggestion that this will have any impact on sales of Sonos' networked home audio system is unconvincing,  to put it politely. .

You can export your Sonos playlists (eg using my app) then convert them into whichever format your head unit requires (probably m3u). Of course that assumes the head unit can access wherever your music is (not gonna work if its on a NAS).

You can tell me all you want that the playlist is just a remote control for home-based hardware. That’s perfectly fine. I get that. And I’m telling you that I should be able to get in my car, open up my same playlist, and play the same songs in my car. I don’t want to maintain two different playlists. Obviously I can just use Spotify or Napster or whatever in the car -- using two different playlists -- and that’s the whole problem. 

My Sonos playlist pulls songs from Napster, Amazon Music, Google Music, and my own Microsoft One Drive. There is no Napster or Spotify equivalent. So it’s not that simple anyway.

Think what you want, but in the future people will use whatever system works everywhere, i.e., works both at home and in the car. For a fee why not just sell me something that will make my Sonos playlist work in the car? I’ll pay it.

If Sonos wants to live in the past they can. But I’m just going to seek out a solution where my playlist works both at home and on the road. Eventually I will find a solution I assure you. I’d rather that solution be Sonos. But if it’s not, it’s not.

I’m tired of maintaining a playlist that doesn’t work anywhere but home. There’s a great opportunity here for Sonos to get involved in car audio. If they don’t see that, it’s their loss.

Are you asking for a Sonos sound system running off 12V that can be installed in cars (which I would assume needs both a Sonos Head Unit and Sonos speakers in order to meet Sonos’ sound quality demands), or just some kind of “portable playlist” that is recognised by multiple equipment manufacturers including Sonos?

I would like to get in my car, open my Sonos app, and play my playlist. It’s that simple. They could easily just open up a bluetooth connection through the app. That alone would solve it.

The idea that playlists are stored on Sonos devices and therefore this can’t work is of course ridiculous. The app can easily capture the playlist and it would be simple to use the playlist in the car. If they do that, now the multiple Internet-based sources I store music on can now pull into the car. Obviously any local sources would not work while mobile. But, nobody has to store a song on their own home computer. Very easy to just move it to One Drive, Amazon Music, Google Music, or a whole variety of Internet-based cloud storage.

The reality is, my Sonos playlist only works at home. Can’t take it on vacation. Can’t play it in the car. Can’t take it to the cabin. Can’t plug it in at Hot Tub Gardens. Etc. I want to use the same playlist everywhere.

Sonos actually has the best app I’ve ever seen, allowing music to be pulled from multiple sources. It’s brilliant. It’s just not mobile. And that’s a problem. A competitor absolutely will make a system that’s more universal if Sonos doesn’t. Mark my words. Sonos can lead the way and extend their great technology to mobile if they want to. Doing so will attract new customers and keep current customers like me. I'd prefer to stay with Sonos. But, I will seek the first system that gives me a playlist pulling from multiple sources that works everywhere. It only makes sense.

I’m not going to stop using Sonos boxes and/or speakers in my home just because I can now play my playlist in the car. The ability to play my playlist in the car would not have caused me to purchase one less physical component. At the end of the day I prefer the high-quality wifi sound and convience at home. But I’d happily settle for a bluetooth connection in the car vs. having the entire app not work. Sell me a box I can plug in through USB in the car if you have to. I’ll buy it. I just want something that works.

Why not just split up your Sonos playlist into a playlist for each music service? Those playlists will work in the car just fine via their respective apps, and they will work just fine on your Sonos at home as well. Plus they will keep in sync without any effort in your part.

Bonus feature: they also work in your pocket when you are at the beach, away from car and home.

Well, because that’s an awful idea. Just being frank. I appreciate the suggestion though.

Yes, I could go into my Playlist and split all of the different sources into different lists with considerable effort. Then I would have to maintain my main Sonos playlists plus all of these sub lists at each music source separately forever. What a disaster.

Furthermore, now I can’t just have a single playlist of what I want. If I have 4 music sources, there’s no way to make a playlist that pulls from all of them. I’m stuck running up one app at a time. Just try doing that while driving 500 miles across the country. It’s ridiculously inconvenient.

Do you know of any mobile playlist app where you can build a single playlist that pulls from Google Music, Amazon Music, Microsoft One Drive, Napster, Spotify, etc.? It would be great if all of my 700+ songs existed all in one place, but they do not. If no such app exists, then IMHO Sonos should be that app. I absolutely love the Sonos app. But it’s completely worthless the moment I step foot out of the house. Sonos needs to have a mobile option, or again somebody else will. Some third party app may already exist and I just don’t know about it. Who knows.

By the way, if I did your suggestion above it’s even worse than I thought. Now even at home I can’t have a single playlist that has everything on it that I want. Now even at home I’d have to go through multiple playlists to play everything, not to mention have to remember what playlist each and every song is on because they can no longer be on one. What a nightmare.

Right now I can just pull up the playlist I want and I know what’s on there regardless of where the song is hosted. I just can’t take it with me. It’s a huge problem. Maybe I’m unique and all other Sonos users just use the Sonos app at home and don't care that it doesn’t work anywhere else they go. 

As you probably know, it’s a ton of work just to keep one Sonos playlist current let alone many. Places like Napster move songs around and the song on the Sonos playlist just breaks, giving the round CD icon which means the song is no longer connected. Happens all the time, and takes considerable effort each time to figure out where the song moved and get it reconnected. With this constant pain in the rear always being present, it’s hard to imagine adding even more playlists to the mix now. One playlist needs to work everywhere. That should be obvious. Again just MHO. Multiple playlists for multiple devices just isn’t practical. Thanks for your response.

Fulfilling your request would require storing the actual music files on an usb stick or a portable HDD. No way the rightholders behind the various music services are going to grant this approach. Even today the Sonos controller isn’t able to read and play the encrypted music files you may have downloaded from Napster, Amazon Music, Google Music onto your phone for copyright reasons.