Napster with Alexa

I have been with Sonos from start great product, now I have added Alexa to my system so please speak to Napster about Alexa connectivity

Will Alexa be able to work with Napsterditto x many

i'd like compatibility with napster too!

I would also like to have Napster controlled by Alexa.

I was actively encouraged by Sonos to use Napster as it was offered free for 6 months on Sonos purchases, so it’s a bit out of order for Sonos not to have this platform available for use with Alexa. Be nice for Sonos to reply to this thread, even just to tell us it’s not gonna happen

It's not really up to Sonos. Right now, Amazon's Connected Speaker API for Alexa only supports music services that are supported on Alexa. If that is going to change, Amazon has to change it, either by allowing connected speakers to control native services via Alexa, or supporting your preferred music service on Alexa devices.

But it was Sonos' decision to throw away all the work to support any and all music services, a feature that remains unique to their hardware, and hand total control over which services would be supported to Amazon. Amazon also control the speech grammar entirely too (which is why we don't have group volume, or groups generally).

But it was Sonos' decision to throw away all the work to support any and all music services, a feature that remains unique to their hardware, and hand total control over which services would be supported to Amazon. Amazon also control the speech grammar entirely too (which is why we don't have group volume, or groups generally).

Yes, that was the decision so they would not have to force users to run a local server, say clunky commands, and suffer the non-intelligent responses inherent to a "tell Sonos to do xxx" type of skill. Instead they made a less amateur, more integrated interface utilzing Amazon's API. Perhaps you'd like to compare sales figures to see what approach is more popular?

Sigh.

So I guess that's a big "No" on comparing sales figures? 😃

But it was Sonos' decision to throw away all the work to support any and all music services, a feature that remains unique to their hardware, and hand total control over which services would be supported to Amazon. Amazon also control the speech grammar entirely too (which is why we don't have group volume, or groups generally).

Yes, that was the decision so they would not have to force users to run a local server, say clunky commands, and suffer the non-intelligent responses inherent to a "tell Sonos to do xxx" type of skill. Instead they made a less amateur, more integrated interface utilzing Amazon's API. Perhaps you'd like to compare sales figures to see what approach is more popular?

Sonos has always had the ability to play music from multiple sources including locally stored music. That was one of the biggest selling points. Multiple sources, different rooms, one source perfectly synced in multiple rooms. The possibilities were endless and Sonos seemed to lead from the front.

Nobody forced us to run a local server but if we wanted to listen to our locally stored music we accepted it and got on with it. I'm one of the users who was given a free 6 month napster trial which has worked flawlessly, for many years, with sonos, and is cheaper than the other streaming services so I'm certainly not going to sign up to Amazon (who appear to want to control the world). Sonos, rather than making us run a server want us to pay a third party? Sorry, but I decide who gets my money. As for the clunky commands, the app is now clunky and Alexa's skills are massively restricted which makes it quite useless, so this seems like a massive step backwards for me.

There are sales on right now, Sonos Plays are on offer with a massive discount, I am so disappointed with the Sonos One that I certainly wont be buying any more speakers until Sonos return to what they are good at, provide a way to play various music streams from various places to various speakers. Add in the dubious marketing ploy of controlling your music through voice only when it works for all or drop Alexa and develop their own AI.

Rather than compare sales figures, maybe compare the amount of customers who feel cheated by the all singing, all dancing Sonos One with Alexa against those who bought a Sonos Play 1 and found it worked right out of the box.