Hello. I’ve owned and loved Sonos for just over a year and would love to share a few ideas for future updates.
- Airplay groups: when you create a stereo pair between two speakers, it shows up in Airplay as a single speaker. What if we could use the same concept and create Airplay groups within the app that we can then connect to in the Airplay interface with one tap. For example, say I want to connect to all my downstairs speakers in one tap: I create the Airplay group in the app, select my downstairs speakers, name it “downstairs,” and now whenever I open the Airplay interface on my iPhone I can select “downstairs” and it connects me to all the speakers in that Airplay group, in one tap.
Sonos has the ability to created saved groups in the Sonos app, for use when creating groups of speakers in Sonos. I don’t think Apple airplay has any access to this though. Such saved groups would need to be created on Apples side of things, and Apple would surely want to include non-Sonos speakers in their grouping feature.
- In-app restart button: almost all devices can benefit from a restart once in a blue moon, even Sonos. For those who have multiple speakers, maybe some in hard to reach places, tapping a button in the app settings to restart the entire system (or a single speaker) would be a wonderful quality-of-life feature to save us the headache of moving furniture to reach outlets and running around the house unplugging speakers and plugging them back in.
I think there was a feature like this at one point, but it was removed for some reason that I don’t recall.
- Smoother group adjustments: say I started Airplaying music to my kitchen speaker, and then add more to the group. And now I want to go somewhere else and stop the music in the kitchen. If I try removing the kitchen from the group, it stops the music everywhere. I guess because the kitchen is the “host” speaker for the music session. I would love if the system knew to keep the stream going when I remove the first speaker from the group. Maybe this wouldn’t ne an issue if I used the app to begin music, but I use a niche 3rd party music app so I cannot do this. So I’ll usually get the music going, connect to one speaker via Airplay, then head to the S2 app and group the rest of my speakers. This way is faster than connecting to them all over Airplay.
Thank you for reading!
Sonos itself can handle that sort of change in grouping you describe, but Airplay is targeting a specific group. Assuming your other speaker/room you want to airplay too is airplay capable on it’s own, then you would need to use Apple’s airplay tech to send audio to that speaker directly. I’m not terribly familiar with airplay, so can’t tell you exactly what you can and can’t do via airplay in terms of changing where a stream is playing too, just that Sonos can force an airplay streaming started on one speaker (from your iphone to speaker) to move over and stream directly to a different speaker.
For me, Airplay has always been a bolt-on to Sonos, and doesn’t fit well with the design of the Sonos system. When you use Airplay you are barely using the Sonos system at all, just a bunch of Airplay compatible speakers with a Sonos logo on them.
Grouping and ungrouping behaviour is much better using the Sonos system and app, and I am not sure it is within Sonos’ gift to make Airplay work any differently.
The reboot feature was, I think I recall, from a browser not the app, using the same interface as the network matrix. I think it was withdrawn along with certain other features as a security measure. I can see that this would be useful to some users.
For me, Airplay has always been a bolt-on to Sonos, and doesn’t fit well with the design of the Sonos system.
I think of airplay as ‘bluetooth, but with WiFi’.
I don’t use it personally but would the iOS App Soro help the OP with what he is trying to do?
Smoother organization adjustments: say I commenced Airplaying track to my kitchen speaker, after which upload greater to the organization. And now I need to head somewhere
