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Apple Music w/in Sonos is outdated!

  • 3 August 2021
  • 9 replies
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It’s 2021 and yet the Apple Music w/in the Sonos app looks like it’s from 2001!  Bottom line is that features within the Apple Music app are missing from Sonos.  There’s no Browse.  The My Music feature doesn’t show all of my downloaded music that I have in my Apple Music Library.  The Radio feature within Sonos doesn’t match up.  Even the ‘My Sonos’ feature is not accurate.  The ‘recently played’ isn’t in sync or flat out wrong.    

I love the Sonos speakers and want to add to my system but dang it Sonos, the app is really starting to cause a problem and has me thinking of going in another direction.  Yes, the Sonos app will play music but it’s becoming a pain.  I get it that Sonos has to work with Apple and other providers but I’ve been a Sonos user for years and still nothing has improved.  

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Best answer by Airgetlam 3 August 2021, 19:29

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Yeah I get that and understand the interface API process.  I work in the software industry.  However, it’s not my responsibility to complain to Apple.  Sonos is an Apple Interface partner and it’s there responsibly to ask for a more robust feature set for their own customers.  I’m sure Sonos is trying but come on, the feature set is weak and has to change.  This is on Sonos to try and make it happen, not me.

 

Who are you paying for access to Apple Music, Sonos or Apple? 

Seriously, posting here to complain about the Apple interface is like complaining to Visio about the opening credits on your favorite TV show.

No issue with anything you’ve identified, but you should be talking to Apple, not Sonos. Apple is the one who decided which parts (and how) of the Sonos API they have implemented. Sonos doesn’t have any control over that. They’ve written the API, but they can’t go in to Apple’s servers/service and hook up whatever they want to, that’s for Apple’s engineers to do. 

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No issue with anything you’ve identified, but you should be talking to Apple, not Sonos. Apple is the one who decided which parts (and how) of the Sonos API they have implemented. Sonos doesn’t have any control over that. They’ve written the API, but they can’t go in to Apple’s servers/service and hook up whatever they want to, that’s for Apple’s engineers to do. 

It’s also worth noting that Sonos is (to my knowledge) the only manufacturer that has any form of Apple Music integration. I think pretty much everyone else relies on AirPlay from an Apple device for Apple Music content.

Good note, certainly. 

Also important to note that Sonos writes the API that a streaming company implements not only on their server, but the things that you have access to in the controller. That API is not infinite, but if there is a feature being used by another streaming company and not another, that means that company’s engineers haven’t fully utilized the Sonos API. A great but painful place to see this is the original implementation that was done fairly well for Google Music, but the extremely poor integration that Google’s engineers did when they switched to YouTube Music.

There are certainly some things that the individual company supports that is not currently in the Sonos API, so you’ll rarely see all the exact same features in the Sonos controller as are in the streamer’s own client, but it does cover a fairly wide range of features. 

You can see more details as to what is supported by the Sonos API in the Sonos partners page.

 

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Would Airplay 2 not be an option for you?

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I’m really missing the “top songs” feature for an artist from the Sonos app, rendering the implementation of Apple Music rather useless for me. A shame since Apple has lossless audio compared to Spotify.

I’m really missing the “top songs” feature for an artist from the Sonos app, rendering the implementation of Apple Music rather useless for me. A shame since Apple has lossless audio compared to Spotify.

I can get a preference of the Apple Music interface to Spotify etc or vice versa, but none less than the head of Apple Music has confirmed that Apple lossless sounds no different than Apple AAC; nor will it sound better than Spotify lossy, by extension. Something that many here have said for years, but a little more credibility may attach in the eyes of some to a senior executive in a company that offers lossless.

Yeah I get that and understand the interface API process.  I work in the software industry.  However, it’s not my responsibility to complain to Apple.  Sonos is an Apple Interface partner and it’s there responsibly to ask for a more robust feature set for their own customers.  I’m sure Sonos is trying but come on, the feature set is weak and has to change.  This is on Sonos to try and make it happen, not me.

Yeah this is my first week of having a Sonos speaker, and it’s almost worth going back to the Bluetooth speaker so I can use the Apple Music app.

 

Im a software and app designer, and the Sonos app is  10 years outdated from a usability perspective. And the api services too - I want all my stuff in there with a similar experience to what Apple does.