So now many of us are losing the ability to stream from Google Play, are Sonos looking to help their users find another free streaming service?
I found iBroadcast but can see that a few years back conversations were happening between the companies, but what has happened?
+23
There is a reason there is no free service for this: it costs money to run such a thing. Unless free stuff can be subsidized with ads then there is no point in anyone doing this. Businesses tend to like making money.
If you want to play your music collection, stick it somewhere safe (eg on your PC) and tell Sonos to play it from there. Problem solved. And also free.
Couple of points.
GPM was a nice free feature, I'm sure the costs for running it were/are substantial. But I was happy for my music tastes, streaming data etc to be shared with them for use of the service. In the same way their free web browser operates. If you can't see the product, you're the product as they say.
As google is prone to do, they like to drop products, someone has seen potential revenue to move GPM to youtube and now charge to stream your content back. The data, stats, tagging etc obviously not returning enough in GPM.
My point is, they could easily afford to run this, they were not exactly spending time fixing bugs in it. Instead they have come up with a half baked idea to drop this all into YT it seems with the same lack of fixing and development. They could have simply run adds in the GPM browser aimed at your content and listening.
Secondly, there does seem to be a compmay out there offering the fabled free upload and streaming who I'm sure are nowhere near googles revenue, but they do it. Problem is Sonos does not support it, and I can't find out the reasons why it hasn't happened.
Surely being supported by Sonos is not a bad partnership to have, and being partnered with a company that allows people to stream their own music free to your products is also good.
So what is stopping it happening?
Lastly, yes I could stream over the home network from my NAS, but not everyone has the time or money for these and for many the technical knowledge to put this together, they are also not totally bullet proof. I certainly don't run mine 24/7 and won't on the chance I think I'll play some music while washing up, I'll just put the radio on.
As they say, if it works don't fix it, and it's broken now.
Sonos does not have the legal rights to add any stream to the Sonos ecosystem that they choose. Instead, Sonos has set up a system by which they provide information and an API publicly, to everyone, at the Sonos partners page, so that anyone can choose to be associated with the Sonos ecosystem.
So if a company such as iBroadcast doesn’t appear in Sonos, and you want them to, your best bet is to lobby iBroadcast, who has to not only give permission to Sonos, but actively implement the Sonos API to their servers so that the Sonos controller is able to properly communicate to get the stream, and all associated data (searches, etc.).
This is not a conspiracy by Sonos. It’s a simple matter of other companies choosing to become part of the Sonos ecosystem. I’m sure there is cooperation needed, but the initial effort by Sonos has already been generated. The next step needs to be taken by iBroadcast.
After searching and digging about, it seems this is in preview, but you can still add and use iBroadcast if you follow the Sonos Lab link in add services.
Just created an iBroadcast account and uploading now.
After searching and digging about, it seems this is in preview, but you can still add and use iBroadcast if you follow the Sonos Lab link in add services.
Just created an iBroadcast account and uploading now.
That sounds promising… Please let us know how you get on.
iBroadcast is now compatible with Sonos, and I love it! I transferred more than 600 albums from GPM to YTM only to learn that YTM was going to charge me to listen to them on Sonos. So I kissed YTM good-bye and now use iBroadcast. It’s easy to use and works well with Sonos. Yay!
I thought I updated this but it was probablty the Google Play site I replied to.
Just to say that iBroadcast is working very well and considering that the site is still in beta I’ve not found any issues.
As with GPM you can get some index issues especially if the MP3 tag has additional artists in there, then you end up with multiple entries for the album. That said their album edit is easy to use to correct this.
When you upload there is an option to use a default 3 feeds or up to 6, I missed this before clicking upload and my collection took over 24 hours, but you can stop and start easy enough.
In my reply on the GPM site I said it was pretty poor of google to drop this service, yes understand all the “it costs them money” to run this for free. But I’m pretty sure the musice I played and searched for went into their data pool and that for me was a fair trade off, plus they are not exacly poor are they.
However the GPM for all its faults (that never seemed to be fixed) worked well for me over a number of years. No I won’t be moving the YTM and paying to play my music, me like others probably have too many of these 8.99 accounts hanging off my bank account that one day I’ll decide if they are really worth the cost for the use I make of them.
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