Contributor I

Question

When will Sonos support Airplay?

Forum|Forum|10 years ago
December 2, 2015
37 replies
4180 views

Hi Sonos,
Please somebody tell us, if and when airplay support will be added. It is definitely possible to do as some people have already written open source code to do it. But it is a hassle to use as I need to run a program on my mac to be able to stream music directly to my sonos speakers from my music app on my iPhone or iTunes. I can already now stream my AppleMusic from the cloud , I can stream DRM music. With airplay we just don't need to worry about your controller limitations.

Why can't you guys add official support,so I don't need to remember to start the service on my mac?
You are in the business of hardware, let Apple and others be in the business of music software.
I am now Apple Music subscriber and most of my music is in the cloud. and all the speakers I bought over $4000 USD would be worthless to me because none of my new music is accessible via official channels.
Thank god for the open source project that makes is available and simple. So it is doable even by people who do not privy to your internals. It should be very easy for official Sonos developers.

Also I don't like your player interface! It is NOT as good as Apple or Spotify. Please Please can you just add support for AirPlay?

And if NOT, please tell me WHY NOT?

Regards,

-D.

Apple

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D

digiMusicAuthor

Contributor I

nice article on 9to5mac. don't get me wrong, I love Sonos and have it in every room of my house. just want to be able play my music on it. Looks like I'll have it soon. at the end I am not married to AirPlay, I just want a convenience of being able to play music without any limitation of where it is.
Seem like we will have it soon.

I did not realize that Sonos 5 v2 I just bought, plays music directly from a streaming service rather than streaming it from an iPhone or iMac. This is very cool.
so that means, Apple Music may stream directly to a speaker bypassing the devices. I think I will take that over AirPlay.
Meaning , I can start the playback and leave the room or even the house and what I started can continue playing.

R

RichyS

Lyricist II

I've been wanting AirPlay for 2 years, and adding Apple Music is of no interest to me.

I have my music on a NAS, and linked to an iTunes account. I need to turn on my PC and update iTunes to get that music on the NAS to be able to stream it to Sonos. That's fine for music.

I also listen to podcasts every day. They auto download to my phone/iPad, so I want to be able to play them direct from my phone. I'm not going to update my iTunes twice a day just to listen to a 30 minute podcast once. I'm also not going to buy an apple router just for that one function.

Is it now accepted they will never be adding AirPlay support?

D

digiMusicAuthor

Contributor I

RichyS, Nobody knows if airplay in the future will be supported, but to solve your particular problem of music on NAS, it should just work no? if music on NAS is part of iTunes, you should already be able to play all of it on Sonos as sonos allow you to play your local iTunes library.

Another solution is to sign up for iTunes Match service, which brings ALL your music to iCloud. now they allow up to 100,000 songs to be matched.
So your entire library will be available to you on ALL your devices for about $20/year. Not a bad deal and I consider that a $20/year backup for my library.

Once your music is in the cloud, you can stream it to Sonos as if it was AppleMusic from your iPhone or macbook or iPad.
That leaves podcasts. I think they should work just the same .

buzz

Grand Maestro

It is not practical for SONOS to add Airplay to legacy SONOS gear. This means that SONOS would need to provide some sort of accessory box or one would need to purchase a future SONOS unit that can directly support Airplay. In either case there would be an additional expense for a user to incorporate native Airplay into SONOS. In this context, if one simply adds an Airport Express, the additional cost would be a wash, but one could use Airplay now.

Personally, I have no use for Airplay and I would be annoyed if the cost of SONOS units was increased simply to include native Airplay.

J

jdesm

Lyricist III

Hi all, hacking this thread about Airplay slightly - please allow me to ask - I need to expand my home setup and looking into Sonos. Right now, I stream to an (old) Hi-fi Amp&speakers and to an Airplay speaker, at the same time and all from iTunes. The advantage for me is I can have the audio output to all 3 in sync (2 systems + computer) - works great (apart from the speaker which has fairly bad wifi and cuts off sometimes).

I could buy more airplay devices, but recently it does seem that support is slowly dropping... So I'm looking into Sonos, but am having a few issues figuring out the potential to use Airplay on it whilst keeping in sync with my current system...

I could of course buy a connect amp to replace my 50 (yes!) year old amp, and drop my other airplay speaker - but is there a solution to use my computer speakers in sync with Sonos somehow? Don't really want to have to buy 2 more play 1's for my office, which has pretty good Bose speakers on the computer...

(I was thinking of either airsonos or the "official" airport express+connect amp trick and using Airplay - but then maybe the Sonos app can output directly on the computer speakers?)

Thanks in advance!

ratty

Firstly the Sonos app is a controller, not a media player. Over the years there's been heated debate about this issue but suffice to say that (a) there are technical reasons why a general purpose computer wouldn't guarantee sub-millisecond sync with the hardware players, and (b) Sonos would be undermining their own business model by allowing free software to emulate a player. IMHO it just isn't going to happen.

As for combining Airplay speakers with a Sonos system fed by an Airport Express, unless you can delay the sound from the non-Sonos devices it wouldn't all play in sync. There's a ~70ms delay between a Sonos Line-In jack and the players' audio outputs.

J

jdesm

Lyricist III

Thanks for the prompt reply. If it's really only 70ms, it's ok enough (for me) to go from room to room without noticing too much, i.e. possibly even to keep the computer playing music. I understand the rationale behind not supporting computer output, however it does force people to buy yet more speakers (which, ok, might not be such a negative point from Sonos' point of view).

Any thoughts on Airsonos vs Airport into Connect:Amp in terms of delay? (I wanted to get play 1's in stereo pairs to start but using the airport express method means buying a connect:amp - I'm not sure I need play 5's, in pair it gets expensive and I really care for stereo in each room)

Thanks!

Firstly the Sonos app is a controller, not a media player. Over the years there's been heated debate about this issue but suffice to say that (a) there are technical reasons why a general purpose computer wouldn't guarantee sub-millisecond sync with the hardware players, and (b) Sonos would be undermining their own business model by allowing free software to emulate a player. IMHO it just isn't going to happen.

As for combining Airplay speakers with a Sonos system fed by an Airport Express, unless you can delay the sound from the non-Sonos devices it wouldn't all play in sync. There's a ~70ms delay between a Sonos Line-In jack and the players' audio outputs.

ratty

Any thoughts on Airsonos vs Airport into Connect:Amp in terms of delay?

No, can't help. Other posters may be able to.

F

Fofer

Collaborator II

First of all, that "open source code" is an illegal hack, and has ceased working with the newer Mac OS.

Hack, sure. Illegal? I dunno (and don't really care...)

But I can say with certainty that SonoAir "experimental" beta5 works just fine on the latest OS X 10.11.3. I know this because I am using it right now, with great success.

http://sonoair.mihosoft.eu/
https://twitter.com/mihosoft/status/662399840614268928
http://sonoair.mihosoft.eu/releases/experimental/SonoAir.zip

Sure, it's a bit clunky, but it works, and that's what's most important to me. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE my Sonos system, and now use Sonos controller more than iTunes. As a diehard iTunes user, I wouldn't have expected that. But Sonos has really impressed me.

Sure, it would be great if Sonos included native AirPlay support in their speakers, as Pioneer and Yamaha do with their wireless speakers. But I suspect there's a good rationale Sonos has chosen to not do this, whether its for cost savings, or competitive reasons. But if I have speakers in a room and can make them AirPlayable too by running a bit of software, I'm all for it. SonoAir beta 5, for the win!

jgatie

First of all, that "open source code" is an illegal hack, and has ceased working with the newer Mac OS.

Hack, sure. Illegal? I dunno (and don't really care...)

Illegal? By the letter of the law, yes. Specifically the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the EU Copyright Directive, both of which criminalize the production and dissemination of technology that allows users to circumvent technical copy-restriction methods. AIrplay has DRM embedded in it's stream, SonoAir circumvents this DRM and extracts the raw data. This is illegal, not to mention Apple can sue them for patent infringement and a host of other reasons. But since SonoAir is one guy in his basement, the FBI has better things to do and Apple isn't going waste the money to sue, instead they do things like screw around with their DRM to make life hard on him.

If a billion dollar a year company such as Sonos circumvented their DRM, the lawyers would be on the phone faster than you can say Steve Jobs.

PS - The post you replied to was a couple months old. At the time, SonoAir was incompatible, due to the screwing around I mentioned above.

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