Skip to main content

Hey guys,

Unlike a bunch of people here in this community I'm happy to not have experienced any issues with my Sonos system that got introduced with the bigger update in May. In fact I'm pretty satisfied with my system and I've been a Sonos user for over 11 years now. When Sonos removed the "analytics" feature about 4-5 years ago, I saw some people complain that it was gone, so I decided to bring this feature back when I have time. So here it is. Feel free to register and check it out: https://audio.report

Current scope:

  • Measure and visualize your sonos usage

  • Compare your usage to the community (not the sonos community, but people registered with the service)

  • Display recently played tracks (my wife was constantly asking questions about songs that I played days ago, so this one is for the ladies)

  • Send weekly summaries

In case you have any feedback, feel free to reach out to me. In case you wonder about my motivation, you can read my FAQs on the website mentioned above.

Cheers,

Joschi

Pretty site: but I see no data.

Also there’s a typo in the FAQ (“adress”).


Ah now I read it more closely, I see I have to sign up before it will collect anything. Which makes sense based on how the API works, now I think of it.


Pretty site: but I see no data.

Also there’s a typo in the FAQ (“adress”).

Thanks for mentioning the typo! I wonder how you got to the page before registering!? Maybe I need to fix a bug...


Trust a programmer to also be a hacker ;)


Trust a programmer to also be a hacker ;)

Well my biggest mistake is, that I’m obviously not Sonos :-D

And of course it’s a pitty that Sonos’ idea of opening up it’s platform to third party applications is not yet ideal. I see two vectors for improving trust:

  1. Allow users to revoke third party application grants
  2. Offer more fine grained control over granted scopes. Currently it’s only full system control, which I don’t need...

I was teasing ​@controlav . Not being a programmer myself, I don’t really have an informed opinion on the ‘openness’ of the Sonos API, which doesn’t color my appreciation of those who write their own clients…especially given I’ve never seen any Sonos commitment to that process. I’d assume Sonos might change the underlying structure at any moment, and frustrate the third party coders who don’t stay on top of their code base. But I just am not aware. 


I have the impression that this ‘statisic’ functionality is much more important to many other parties than it is to me. Why should I make myself the product and doesn't this directly confirm the main reason for the concept change from Sonos to this? 
I originally bought Sonos so that I could listen to good music without any technical background. Also, why does Sonos need to know what I listen to, when and where? 
Great that YOU don't have any problems, but I want to listen to my radio stations (ad-free) again. I want to listen to FLAC again without interruptions from my local NAS. And I want Sonos to sit down with Apple in my customer interest and let me use the buttons on my mobile devices to control the volume again. 


Been using this for a few weeks now, here is my feedback:

  • Login is a PITA. Every time I have to Logon with Sonos, then it sends a conformation email I have to click on. Please, save the token in a cookie.
  • Filter “TV” from the history. Showing every time a TV is used is not useful, at least in my home.
  • Filter “short” tracks from the history. If a track plays that I hate I hit Next, I don’t need to see those in my history.
  • Weekly Summary emails just link to the site, would be nice to see an actual weekly summary of what artists/albums are most popular, maybe also filtered by speakers used.

The site is beautiful, reminds me every time of how poor my own UX skills are.


Been using this for a few weeks now, here is my feedback:

  • Login is a PITA. Every time I have to Logon with Sonos, then it sends a conformation email I have to click on. Please, save the token in a cookie.
  • Filter “TV” from the history. Showing every time a TV is used is not useful, at least in my home.
  • Filter “short” tracks from the history. If a track plays that I hate I hit Next, I don’t need to see those in my history.
  • Weekly Summary emails just link to the site, would be nice to see an actual weekly summary of what artists/albums are most popular, maybe also filtered by speakers used.

The site is beautiful, reminds me every time of how poor my own UX skills are.

Hey man,

Thank you so much for your feedback!

Regarding your bullet points

  • The token is already saved in a cookie, but it’s only valid for seven days. I already thought about increasing the validity. It’s always a tradeoff between convenience and security. I guess I’ll go for a slightly longer period. In case you have to login every day, could you please let me know which browser and version you are using? Maybe there’s some bug...
  • TV usage is currently the biggest painpoint for me as the cloud events work slightly different in this case. There’s no specific event like for music (start, stop, skip). For the TV the events are more like “silence”, “no signal” and something else I don’t remember right now. And the silence event get’s fired quite often... I’ll think about how to improve this.
  • I could implement this as a setting, thanks for mentioning!
  • I’ll keep an eye out for more feedback in this direction and act accordingly if this comes up more often.

Cheers!


Reply