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Audacy Exclusive Stations available on Sonos?

  • 8 October 2021
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Audacy has a number of “exclusive” stations that appear to be curated streams (for example, Americana, by the DJ Lin Brehmer at wXRT in Chicago).  I can access that exclusive station directly from the Audacy website and from the wXRT website -- but I cannot find it on my Sonos.  All I see on Sonos are the actual radio stations (including wXRT).  

QUESTION:  how do I access an audacy exclusive station on my Sonos system?

thanks

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Best answer by Airgetlam 8 October 2021, 20:52

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Odd, I’ve not been disappointed at all in the S1/S2 split, the update process worked perfectly for me, S2 continues to work perfectly,  and I’m looking forward to new features and  innovations now that there’s more memory in which the OS to exist in.

As with Audacity, the integration of Amazon’s HD is mostly on Amazon’s side. Sonos made the API available, and it’s up to Amazon to send the data correctly. HD does of course take more bandwidth to send around your home, so it’s easy for it to expose borderline cases of network issues, but that’s again not really Sonos’ fault, either. And I hate to sound like an apologist. Sonos has indeed made some pretty substantial mistakes in the past, but has always owned up to them and made fixes as necessary. Much of their recent product line (the Move and Roam) don’t really fit my lifestyle much, so I’m somewhat ambivalent there, but as near as I can tell, if you use them as designed, they work fine. 

But network issues are indeed the bane of any device that lives on a network, and moreso the Sonos, due to the rather different way that they use the network, with communications in between all devices in addition to contact with the controller device, and the outside world, all going on at the same time.

If you’ve got dropouts constantly, I’d certainly recommend not only reading the the wifi interference FAQ which covers a lot of good things to think about, and perhaps implement, but also simply submitting a diagnostic, and either posting the number here, or contacting Sonos directly. I’ll admit that there’s always the potential of getting a phone rep who isn’t as familiar with networking as others, it’s a relatively complex thing, and to expect that minimum wage (I assume) front line folks completely “get” it, rather than reading from a script is a bit much, but the few times I’ve called in, I’ve ended up with relatively knowledgeable folks who ended up being very helpful.

And beyond the actual Sonos folks, there’s a fairly active group of folks here on these forums, that when given good information, can usually figure out what might be going on. Unfortunately, Sonos doesn’t allow us to look at the real “hard” data in the diagnostics, but most of us have seen enough of these situations that look pretty similar to figure out what’s going on. 

Not sure you can, unfortunately. Audacy themselves decide what is available on Sonos directly, not Sonos, so you may be better off asking the CS folks at Audacy. 

However, the term “exclusive” certainly suggests to me that Audacy wants to reserve those stations to their own client, and not allow other clients such as Sonos to access them, likely so that they can keep your eyes on their own advertising channel, but that’s a guess on my part. 

The option is, of course, if you’re using an Apple device, and have the appropriate speakers, you could use AirPlay 2 to send the signal to Sonos. But not everyone has that option, and so far Google hasn’t released anything similar that can be used by Sonos. I could speculate that it’s due to the constant legal battles between Google and Sonos, but who knows. 

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thanks, that, unfortunately, makes perfect sense.  I’m a Sonos guy from day one (2002) and am increasingly disappointed.  S2 vs S1, horrible integration of Amazon Music HD, network/dropout issues constantly, now this Audacy thing. I still love my Sonos but may only because of my huge sunk cost.