iTunes match with Sonos Play 1 and Play 3 (No airplay)

  • 16 March 2023
  • 7 replies
  • 1112 views

Just acquired a couple of Play 1 and a Play 3 and very disappointed to learn I cannot stream music from  my library on any of my Apple devices. I have been an iTunes Match subscriber for about 10 years and my purchased music is stored in the cloud (or the matched equivalent track is streamed to my devices). I assumed that this would work with Sonos but it seems I have to have an Apple Music account as well? I don’t want to (more than) double up on my payments to Apple by subscribing to both services. Is there a way around this?


7 replies

Userlevel 2
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Hi. No I do have a Mac so can see it would work. Will try to set up and see how it goes. 

Nice. A bonus with streaming from your local media library on your Mac is that you can stream in lossless quality, provided that you rip cds in Apple lossless to your Mac of course.

Hi. No I do have a Mac so can see it would work. Will try to set up and see how it goes. 

Userlevel 2
Badge +2

Just acquired a couple of Play 1 and a Play 3 and very disappointed to learn I cannot stream music from  my library on any of my Apple devices. I have been an iTunes Match subscriber for about 10 years and my purchased music is stored in the cloud (or the matched equivalent track is streamed to my devices). I assumed that this would work with Sonos but it seems I have to have an Apple Music account as well? I don’t want to (more than) double up on my payments to Apple by subscribing to both services. Is there a way around this?

I second what Airgetlam says regarding that you should be able to stream from your local library on your mac. This works great, but maybe you don’t have a mac that you store your music files on?

Great - thanks I’ve just been playing with it. It seems that once grouped I can turn the volume down on the speakers I don’t want to hear so looks like a reasonable work around. Thank you for your help ;-)

Userlevel 7

You can start an AirPlay stream from your iOS device to the Sonos Ones and then group the Play:1 or Play:3 with the Ones in the Sonos app. And, yes, the music will play out of the Ones and the grouped devices.

Read more here:

https://support.sonos.com/en-us/article/stream-airplay-audio-to-sonos

Thanks for the speedy response. I should’ve done my research before buying them but they were very cheap and still great speakers.

I have a pair of Sonos One (Gen 2) in my living room and want to put the Play 1 in the dining room and Play 3 in my office. How do I group these and if I do so would that mean the music will play to all devices?

You should be able to stream a locally stored library, using the instructions at https://support.sonos.com/en-us/article/add-your-music-library-to-sonos which include not only “local music” on your hard drive, but also NAS stored music. 

Apple has chosen not to allow streaming of “cloud” music to Sonos. This is a restriction by Apple, and not by Sonos. 

Both the speakers you’ve installed, the PLAY:1 and PLAY:3 were developed long before AirPlay 2 became available, and as a result, they were not designed with an appropriate radio receiver system to accept an AirPlay 2 signal in them. You could potentially choose to do what I did, however. I added one Sonos One (you could use an SL, they weren’t available when I did this) as an AirPlay 2 target, and then simply group the PLAY:1 and the PLAY:3 with that Sonos One, and get the AirPlay 2 signal to play across all of your devices. 

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