Apple Music is a huge upgrade for classical users. Great search, content and sound. But Apple music search on Sonos is a joke. It only works 10% of the time and then when it does work if often doesn’t find stuff that I know is there. So I resort to playing from my phone or computer to my Sonos system by Airplay, which I don’t love for many reasons. Is anyone else having this problem? Any workarounds?
Sonos Apple Music search is a joke
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Just an FYI, Sonos provides the API for Apple to return results from a search. Sonos set it up this way so they don’t have to build seperate development efforts for every service you can use on Sonos, and so that they don’t get into disputes with the services about how there service is presented. If you’re unhappy with the quality of the search, not much Sonos can do about it other than pass the word on to Apple to make changes on their side.
I’m not sure that Apple is too motivated to change things though to be honest. For one, the natural inclination is for consumers to blame Sonos rather than Apple on this, so any lacking doesn’t bother them that much. For two, Apple would rather you use airplay than the Sonos app. A dependency on airplay means that you are more tied to the Apple ecosystem, they can sell more licenses to airplay, and you could more easily switch over to using homepods one day. But anyway, best course of action is to bring this to Apple’s attention.
Danny
Very helpful answer, Danny. Thanks. As it happens I know the Apple Classical lead person in New York, so I’ll ask him.
+24Have you tried both “Old Search” and “New Search”? (Unless on Desktop when its only Old). Is there any difference in results?
Can you give examples of “bad” results?
OK just let’s say I’m looking for recordings of Beethoven conducted by Claudio Abbado. So I search on Beethoven Abbado. Old search returns 2 songs and no albums. New search returns 3 songs and zero albums. New search return 3 songs, 3 stations and zero albums. Go to Apple Music (not even the new classical app, just the regular one) and the same search returns dozens of albums and hundreds of songs. It’s so broken it’s incredible. It’s pretty clear that the link between Sonos and Apple is monumentally screwed up.
No argument with the data being ‘odd’. The fact is, Sonos merely passes the search data to Apple’s servers, who do the work, then they pass the resulting data back to Sonos for display in the controller. Sonos doesn’t have much to ‘own’ in that process, I’m afraid.
+24Spotify and Tidal both do a lot better job than Apple Music with your example search, they return literally piles of results. Apple really doing a poor job here for sure.
Nothing to do with Sonos, Search results all 100% Apple’s code.
Author of the leading independent Sonos apps for Android, MacOS, iOS, Windows and Xbox.
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