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Allow Soundtrack Your Brand Scheduling or Improve Sonos Alarms

  • 22 February 2024
  • 4 replies
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I pay for Soundtrack Your Brand and when I complained to them about how their Scheduling service doesn’t work with Sonos, and I have to use Sonos Alarms instead, I was told that they have problems with features on Sonos because Sonos doesn't support volume normalization for playlists. Sonos Alarms are not ideal, as they immediately cut off any song that is playing and then slowly start the new station listed per the alarm with the sound slowly moving to the designated volume. This is pretty jarring in the middle of service. The Alarms are made necessary because Sonos doesn't allow Soundtrack to play without using the Shuffle option, and when shuffling Soundtrack itself uses an algorithm for the shuffle so you end up hearing the same song multiple times, not matter how long the playlist is. It feels like all the features of Soundtrack are being limited because Sonos has its own commercial music competitor now, which is a real shame.

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Best answer by Sotiris C. 22 February 2024, 14:59

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Userlevel 7
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Hello @RecluseBrewWorks, welcome to Sonos Community!

Thank you for the feedback, it is really appreciated. I’ve marked this thread as a feature request for improvement of our Alarms feature, adding a fade out and fade in option if music is already playing on a speaker when an alarm triggers.

In regards to the features available while using a music service within the Sonos App, each individual music service is responsible for the development of those features.

I’m not quite sure about what you were told by Soundtrack, but you can have a look on the following Legal Music | Sonos website and also Soundtrack and Sonos for some additional information.

I hope this helps.

Hi Sotiris,

It sounds like Soundtrack may have passed the some of the blame on features not being available to you folks at Sonos. If you are able to put a feature request for a fade in and out that would be very helpful. If it’s possible to request the option to turn off shuffling while using Soundtrack that would be appreciated as well. 

Many thanks.

Userlevel 6
Badge +13

I don’t think that any of the major music  stream services on Sonos support volume normalization, yet all the ones I’ve tried support this in their apps. Its kind of strange none have this (correct me if I’m wrong)
 

There has been some discussion of this previously where the services were blamed as is here, but it isn’t clear whether Sonos actually supports this for the services. See this thread 

 

@Sotiris C. can you confirm that Sonos actually supports this in SMAPI? Will make a feature request if you can confirm. 

 

Userlevel 7
Badge +14

Hey @Bumper,

What does normalized volume mean?

Audio normalization simply adjusts the gain of an audio file so that some measurable feature—usually peak level or integrated loudness—matches a predetermined target level.

The same amount of gain is applied to the whole file so that the dynamic range remains unchanged.

For the normalization to be there it requires us, Sonos, to apply it and for a music service to provide it.
As an example, audio/volume normalization was the thing with Apple Music, where the volume was corrected, and for the major part of our user seemed super loud.

I hope this helps.

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