Radio-Canada's Ici Musique?

Have you checked with them to see what streaming radio service they’ve associated with? Or looked in their website?

Hey… I just looked around some more and now CJBC-FM (my fave!) is there in Toronto local radio.

Thanks for your reply. I never would have checked again.

Antonia

Thumbs up for a dedicated Ici Musique app, like Sonos currently supports for CBC Music.

If Sonos supports Canada, they need a dedicated French service on their Sonos App.

I use RC Ohdio app on my Android phone, and was quite disappointed that my Sonos speaker does not support Google Cast.  Contacted Sonos customer service about this, and they said use TuneIn to access Ici Musique radio streams.  I want access to the Ici Musique radio show archive and music streams. This is not supported by 3rd Party TuneIn.

Sonos should stick with making good speakers, and not trying to compete with Google Cast API.  That’s the other issue - you need to use Sonos App to access the streams, and not the originating music app directly from your phone.

Agreed. Sonos needs to show that it wants to reach all Canadians, anglophone and francophone. RadCan is a public broadcaster, largely supported with tax dollars. Furthermore, its radio and music services are commercial-free.

I know there are Radio Canada radio and music service apps. What’s the big deal in adding them?

Sonos should understand these are "staple" music services for Canada, and support directly (ie. not through 3rd party like TuneIn) as a minimum.

These kind of issues make me want to choose content & seamless over quality, and ditch Sonos for a Google speaker product.

Thanks Bruce. I shall do that.

I've already sent something to Radio Canada.

This is content for Sonos. I thoughqt they'd be interested in facilitating that.

I sent something to. I got a boilerplate “receipt” in reply promising a real answer asap. On verra!

Meme chose.

No reply yet from Radio Canada on Sonos integration.  Shouldn't be up to Sonos user community to pursue such things.

Meanwhile, I've purchased a Google Nest Mini at 1/10th the cost of my Sonos One. I'm now happily accessing my Radio Canada podcasts and music shows. I can also pair it with a Bluetooth speaker for better quality listening.

My current conclusion is that the Sonos system is good for the background elevator music crowd, including business and offices. For more personal curation of music and content, look elsewhere.  As it has a good quality speaker product, I'm hoping the situation changes with Sonos.

I think Google is evil. Lots of reasons for that opinion all of which I can’t be bothered to share here. But hey, here’s one: Google has systematically destroyed local newspapers. Just like Facebook!

Off topic anyway.

As for your statement re. “the background elevator crowd,” it is to laugh. Again, trolling. Or, at the very least, thread hijacking. FTR: I have many self-curated playlists, via my Macs or other Apple devices, as well as Spotify.  I must have thousands of CDs I no longer know what to do with. So we’re not all easy listening types.

Back to the topic at hand:

With respect to Radio-Canada, I got another form email the other day:

<Bonjour,

Ce message est pour vous informer que votre demande est toujours en cours et que nos équipes travaillent dessus. Nous sommes désolés pour ce délai de traitement.

Si votre problème est résolu ou que vous souhaitez ajouter des précisions à votre demande, vous pouvez simplement répondre à ce courriel.

L'équipe d'assistance de Radio-Canada>

So I am giving it time, while enjoying the three Ones, one Move, one TV Beam and one Five spread all over my condo (and condo balcony.)

Have a nice day.

Thanks for your reply, and sorry to offend. Statement of opinion is not trolling. I own a Sonos One, and wish to note its limitations relative to other offerings.  I paid a lot of money for one of these. Hopefully, this forum will allow prospective buyers to consider more thoroughly doing their homework than I have.

Thank you

Sorry for this slow response, but we have had Ici Musique available on our Sonos for a long time - I’d guess about 12 years.  I just checked and it is currently working.  The station is listed as “Ici Musique Montreal,” if that makes any difference. 

We may well have added it to our TuneIn favorite stations using its streaming URL, but if we did that I don’t see a quick way in the Sonos apps to reverse-engineer and tell you the URL that we used.  Under “Info and Options” for the station, the only two choices are Remove from My Radio Stations and Add Station to Sonos Favorites.  Is there a way?

Or is your issue (re-reading the original) that you can’t use TuneIn for some reason, so the fact that it’s available through TuneIn is unhelpful & you need it to be available under Sonos Radio? 

If that’s the question, sorry to misunderstand.  Under Sonos Radio, when I search for ICI Musique, I see ICI Musique versions for about ten Canadian locations, though oddly not Montreal, the one we listen to on TuneIn.  They are Toronto, Vancouver, Moncton, Trois-Rivieres, etc.  Maybe this was fixed as a result of your raising it? 

I am in the USA, fwiw.

One more point - the ICI Musique Trois-Rivieres station on Sonos Radio seems to be the exact same French-language voice & music I was hearing on ICI Musique Montreal on TuneIn, so maybe these are 2 names for same station.  The Sonos Radio/Trois-Rivieres version is about 15 seconds ahead, but adds advertisements to the stream that are not in the TuneIn/Montreal version. 

OK, I found it, thank you.

I am kind of disappointed it is not an app like CBC Radio & Music, Spotify and Siirus etc are. It’s just kind of a roundabout way via TuneIn. But I’ll live.

I went for the Toronto station because, what with government budget cuts to the public broadcaster, I expect the “FM” stations are all the same across Canada except maybe for local news and weather breaks. (I used to work at Rad-Can and CBC Montreal and Toronto.)

But I don’t think there are any news breaks anymore on the Ici Musique network. So, basically, it all depends what time zone you are in. You can always time shift by choosing the Vancouver (or whichever) station.

Thanks again

Sure.  You could add it to Sonos Favorites to make it a little less “roundabout”. 

I  tried but there seemed to be no way to do that

It’s not hard, but also not super apparent.

The method and terminology (My Sonos, or Sonos Favorites) may depend on which app are you using - Windows, Mac, iPhone. etc.  But the method appears, at least on my Windows Sonos controller app, to be the same whether you used TuneIn or Sonos Radio to get to the radio station.  Next to the name of the station is a button for a drop-down menu (the button only appears when you hover your mouse over the station name), and one option on the menu is “Add to Sonos Favorites.”

More at this discussion

https://en.community.sonos.com/controllers-software-228995/adding-tunein-my-radio-stations-to-sonos-favourites-6796638

Good luck.

I got the same boilerplate answer to my post about CBC Listen Streams. This lazy, pass-the-buck attitude is not good enough. Sonos customers have paid a premium to buy into this ecosystem and we expect to be super-served on issues like this. Ignoring your customers is a recipe for failure.

There are usually legal ramifications around using other people’s content without express permission, but I can understand your perspective. It just isn’t the way Sonos has ever done business. You could get more information at the Sonos partners page.

To Winter S, Airgetiam is right, in that the content available in a CBC service on your Sonos is up to the CBC, not up to Sonos. 

As with the question in this topic, though, there are almost certainly practical ways to do what you want to do - listen to certain CBC streams on your Sonos.  But you may have to do it through other apps such as TuneIn or Sonos Radio or podcast apps, or finding the streaming URL and adding it yourself.  I can’t try to help you with those though, because the CBC seems to make the services you want unavailable to people outside of Canada.

“That’s the way we’ve always done it” is such a classic cop-out.  

When I say we expect Sonos to super-serve its customers, what I mean is when there is a request to add what is, frankly, a major national broadcaster, we expect Sonos to proactively reach out to that broadcaster on our behalf and do what it takes to get them onto the platform.

That’s a big difference from putting up a webpage that essentially says, “Hey broadcasters, sign up if you want to.”

I would also expect Sonos to respond to its customers who have been asking for this with a status update, even if it’s only to say, “We tried and they refused, here’s why.” That’s what I expect from a company to which we have paid a high cost for for a premium service. 

In my business, the kind of silence and excuses I’m seeing on an issue like this would be completely unacceptable.