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Partner with Roon for rich content

  • 2 March 2022
  • 6 replies
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J
Userlevel 1
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Hi Sonos Feature Teams,

with your ongoing focus on content (such as Sonos Radio HD, Curated Playlists) it would be really cool if you could partner with Roon (more than just being compatible with Roon as endpoints) in order display their rich content (album reviews, band information, lyrics, AppleTV app TV:Remote, recommendations, enhanced search, additional album art, etc.) for us music lovers. As the Sonos speakers are already in the home network, there would be no need for a local Roon Core but only a cloud-service integrating into the Sonos App (and support for more end-devices like AppleTV, FireTVStick, SmartTVs,...) would be needed. This would really enrich the user experience - at least I would be willing to pay a subscription fee for such added value. 

Please contact me if you want to hear my ideas.

Roon Review: https://www.headphonesty.com/2021/05/introduction-to-roon/

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Best answer by Corry P 3 March 2022, 12:02

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6 replies

Corry P
Userlevel 7
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Hi @jrubbel 

Welcome to the Sonos Community!

Thanks for your suggestion. In general, we’re happy to have as many sources of playback as possible. In the case of music services, however, it’s the music service that needs to create a container for their service in our app - I recommend you contact Roon and make the suggestion to them. I have, however, tagged this thread as a feature request.

Please see this article for more information:

 

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." - Albert Einstein
J
Userlevel 1
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Hi Corry, 

 

I think you misunderstood - Roon is NOT a music service, but is embedding music services into one user experience (and perform some other very audiophile tasks which I am not talking about here), very similiar to what Sonos does. However they have very rich content and user experience around music. Thanks for adding this as a official feature request to Sonos, I believe this could make the whole Sonos ecosystem even more attractive.

 

Thanks
Jesko
 

Corry P
Userlevel 7
Badge +18

Hi @jrubbel 

To me, it sounds (in operational terms, at least) very much like Plex. We would still require Roon to prepare a container to interact with our app and provide URI/URLs for the speakers to play the music, and for this, Roon would need to contact us.

As Roon is primarily a music player, however, I’m not sure if it can integrate - our speakers have their own software for playing music, which, in operation, has nothing to do with our app’s functionality. Perhaps Roon would need to be more like the addition of a Voice Assistant to a speaker, in which case it would require a lot more work. It also sounds like our app already does a lot of what Roon does - providing access to multiple online sources and local sources and being able to search them all, or create playlists that bridge multiple sources.

Please don’t take this as a definitive answer - this is just my immediate impression, and I’m not qualified to say what will and won’t work.

As I said, however, this thread has been tagged and your feedback will be seen by the relevant teams for consideration. If this is something you’d like to see in the future, I highly recommend you make the same suggestion to Roon - it’s likely that Roon will only be interested if they know their customers are interested.

Thanks again.

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." - Albert Einstein
J
Userlevel 1
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Hi Corry,

 

thanks for the reply and picking this up - actually including Roon as a player software into Sonos does not make sense (as mentioned by you), but establishing a “web service inferface link” between Sonos and Roon to grab the enriched content when playing music over Sonos and display it in a SonosApp - that was the vision I had :-)

Thanks
 

Corry P
Userlevel 7
Badge +18

Hi @jrubbel 

So it would be more like a plugin that enhanced the details seen on our Now Playing screen - I understand.

Thanks again for your feedback, and please do keep it coming if you have any more ideas!

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." - Albert Einstein
melvimbe

Just my two cents, I have doubts that Roon would want to do something like this.   I get the impression that the information about tracks, albums, etc, is there to enhance the value of their multiroom audio player system.  Seems a little counter intuitive to give that away to Sonos, but maybe they would be interested in a licensing fee.  Does the information your speaking of working with streaming services (Amazon, Spotify, Apple, etc) or only on local files?  

Also worth pointing out that the current trend seems to be control of the speakers without using the Sonos app.  The hard buttons are there of course, and there is Amazon and Google voice control with rumors of Sonos own voice control.    Then there is the growth of casting, where you can use a streaming services own app to play on Sonos speakers, instead of the Sonos app.   Not saying that there can’t be focus on improving the app as a control AND improving control without the app at the same time, but there certainly are priorities.

 

Danny
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