Raising this because some other threads look old. I’m dumbfounded that the Sonos app has no information about release dates, album credits, lyrics, artist descriptions, album descriptions, and so forth. All of the major music services have found a way to do this, surely Sonos can too. Not to mention no way of viewing the audio quality of an album (ie atmos) beforeclicking play. For Apple Music, this means that you have to research what albums are in atmos or hi res lossless, then go back to the Sonos app, search for the album, play it & then verify if it is actually playing atmos or not. This is very time consuming and a real pain in the ***.
I’m tempted to ditch Sonos soon, purely because Sonos really can’t seem to get their act together on the software front. And reading prior threads, the response seems to be to punt the responsibility to the third party service, saying there’s nothing that can be done on the Sonos side. I don’t know, maybe set up a call or two with developers from the other third party services? And hire some UX experts while you’re at it. Surely there’s some way that this can be fixed. The basic functionality of the app seems stuck with almost the same functionality it had 10 years ago, it feels like a slow dinosaur.
Anybody have any insight if Sonos has some of these features on a roadmap? Or do they just not care, which is what it seems like to me.
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Your metadata list is reasonably accurate, but SMAPI does expose lossless tracks when enumerating (Sonos app does not display this, mine does), and SMAPI includes lyrics support (though I’ve never seen a music service that generates it). There is also a Description field for podcasts (only).
The Atmos badge (and the other “high-res” badges) are only displayed after streaming has started as the system has to determine what quality it can play over the transport, that data is not in the metadata (but in the stream).
PS - Is there a direct link to dev info about lyric support? I’m not able to find it.
SMAPI data does not include most of the items you are wanting:
Release date is only included for podcasts, and the apps will display that when the music service provides it.
Lyrics are in theory handled by the app, but I am not aware of any music service that actually sends lyrics data.
Lossless is in the metadata, and my app on Windows (see profile) does show which tracks are lossless before you play them, see the stars:
Qobuz displays the album release date in browse / search.
PS - Is there a direct link to dev info about lyric support? I’m not able to find it.
Interesting, all mention of lyrics support has been deleted when they redid the site a few months ago. You can still find it in internet caches, it used to be here (in May 2023 at least):
What is the technical limitation for the Sonos app to connect & pull data from third party APIs like these? For Apple Music specifically, appears you can request an Album “object” that returns all of the data I mentioned (except lyrics):
And there’s a lot more data that can be pulled about artists, songs, etc in both APIs. Apple also has an “audio variant” response that details whether it’s atmos, lossless, or other formats.
There’s probably an extra cost to use it, haven’t researched it thoroughly. But if other music apps can display scrolling lyrics, I don’t see why the Sonos app can’t.
What prevents the Sonos app from connecting to API services like these? I understand it is a lot of coding work for each service… beyond that I’m not understanding what the tech issue is.
Thanks,
Josh
PS - Is there a direct link to dev info about lyric support? I’m not able to find it.
Interesting, all mention of lyrics support has been deleted when they redid the site a few months ago. You can still find it in internet caches, it used to be here (in May 2023 at least):
Ok, so the final answer is nothing is likely to change soon (at least for the requests that I’m interested in seeing). I don’t understand why anybody would actively not want to see things like release dates, artist bios, and lyrics, but at any rate.
To be clear, I meant that there are people who don’t care, or are indifferent about more metadata. If it means no change to them, then fine. But if it means they have to do an app update or change how they navigate through the Sonos app, they don’t want it.
I think it’s worth noting as well that although users see search results through the Sonos app, the app isn’t actually doing the search as I understand it, the Sonos devices are. That limits the size of software to do searching, but also means you can do voice control searches, and the device can more easily report back what it’s currently playing. I suppose that could be changed so that the Sonos app does it’s own separate, more advanced lookup using the music services API when available, but that adds a lot of complication.
I think lyrics might be hard feature to accomplish, if you want the lyrics to display in time with the music. That would require the speaker to constantly/regularly send lyric data to the Sonos app. I guess it already does this though, as you can get current runtime data from the Sonos app at any time. Anding lyrics wouldn’t be much different, assuming you can get lyric data from the streaming source.
