Question

Is There An Alternative To The PC App? Or A Better Way To Use It?

  • 11 October 2020
  • 4 replies
  • 449 views
O
Userlevel 2
Badge +2

I’ve been a Sonos user for a long time now, and though I love the convenience, have also, for a long time, found myself missing the experience of browsing a physical collection, or even using the “tile” view in iTunes to queue up albums.

I find the PC app, (and also the mobile apps) quite restrictive in how I can view and sort my collection. In iTunes, I could use the “tile” view to see the cover of many albums at once and scroll through until I found something I wanted to listen to - since moving to an Android phone, I use MusicBee to do a similar job. To browse albums on Sonos’ software shows around 10 albums at once, and the artwork is quite small, and is fixed that way. This is slightly better on a tablet, but still not as good as iTunes/MusicBee. 

I know it’s possible to to browse by genre too, but by default that seems to browse via artist, not album. It also means that each album can only belong to a single category, so couldn’t, for example, be a part of a list of “Hip Hop” albums and “Old School Hip Hop” albums simultaneously.

I thought I might be able to fix this using playlists, but they seem to browse via indivdual songs, not albums, and as I said before, I prefer to queue whole albums up.

A solution would be the ability to customise the main view in the app, change the artwork size, or the window size. Or, be able to browse and sort by custom tags in the app - so, for example, I could leave some text in the “comment” tag of each file and search for that - as long as the results would be displayed as albums, not just songs or artists.

Am I the only one who finds misses browsing a physical collection? Are there any other ways to control Sonos via PC, or any clever workarounds (that don’t involve expensive Room software, or displaying the physical media - which I don’t have room for!) for people who feel the same?

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4 replies

D

I too find the PC app a disappointment, though I guess not as many people use pc vs tablet/phone so I can’t see much time or money spent on changing it.

 For me I’d love for to be able to plug my laptop into the TV for a party and have the album art and playlist displaying on the big screen with a much cleaner interface. 
 
For me the greatest thing was the cover flow interface on the original iPod touch- that was a joy to scroll through. 
 

 

controlav
Userlevel 7
Badge +23

There are various third party Sonos apps for the PC, go look in the Store and try them.

Personally I think the best browser experience for your scenario is probably SonoPad on the iPad.

Author of the leading independent Sonos app for Windows, the only Sonos app for Xbox, and a Sonos app for iOS
O
Userlevel 2
Badge +2

Thanks for the replies folks.

 

I think that perhaps the best solution (though far from perfect) is using a tablet to browse the library. This will mean, (for me) purchasing a new tablet, and that brings some questions with it too.

Does anybody know how the Sonos app decides how many albums to display on the screen when browsing with a  tablet? My mobile phone will show 2 x 2.5, a Samsung Galaxy Tab A 10.1 will show 4 x 4.5.

 

I’m assuming that this is a combination of physical size and available resolution, but would like to know what my display will look like before I take the plunge (I don’t want to end up with a 3 x 4 display, or something like that).

J

Well this is not solving your problems but it is possible to Control the Sonos system also thru Spotify, but this is something I have done very few times (yet) from the computer but it works from phones/tablets.

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