Sonos 11.1 Brings Sonos Radio

As for your third question, it’s a radio station, not a playlist of data. Just like you can’t skip a radio station song in your car, you can’t skip a song on a radio station in Sonos.

Since the service was launched yesterday, I assume, with no real data, that the David Byrne station hasn’t been released yet. Wouldn’t be the first time marketing was in front of reality. 
 

Is it really not a playlist at its core?  When I start the station, play always begins at the beginning of a track.  Pandora has “stations”, too, and I can skip a track.

Stations are not a radio station. Similar concept, but no. I happen to frequently listen to a radio program on the web called Thistle & Shamrock. Because it’s a radio program, and not a playlist or podcast, I can’t skip music that is played. I have to listen to the entire program. Since I happen to record it for consumption at a later time, I’m able to fast forward and rewind, but if when it’s playing on the radio station I use, it’s directly linear. 

I get, and support what you want, but it adds a significant level of complexity to what ‘radio’ is. Is it possible? Sure. Just not likely. 

Oh this does sound like a backwards step, I was hoping BBC stations might be a better stream. Hopefully at least Sonos inserting themselves into the implementation might give some additional options down the line and hopefully guarantee support in the S1 legacy app. 

Hi. In anticipation of the future legacy/modern split, I disabled updates on my system as an experiment. I now find that while my hardware hasn’t updated the app on my phone has automatically updated and I am no longer able to control my Sonos hardware.

Can you confirm that this situation will NOT occur once the last legacy release is made available, please?

There will also be a “Legacy” (S1) app. The S2 fork will be controlled by its dedicated S2 app.

Sonos has stated that you’ll have the option to stay on S1, move to S2, or split.  If you don’t trust them to handle that, and thus the reason for your experiment, why would you trust a response from Sonos regarding updating the app on your phone?  But as already answered, Sonos stated that there will be separate apps for S1 and S2.  For apps in general on phones and tablets, you have the option to have apps automatically update with latest version or not.  Sonos, and any other app developer, doesn’t have the ability to change those settingsfor you.

I guess we’ll have to disagree on this.  It seems to me that the SONOS radio stations are closer to a playlist than an over the air broadcast.  Would be interesting to run the experiment of two of us playing the same station and finding out whether we are served the same tracks at the same time.  Since play only ever begins at the beginning of a song for me, we wouldn’t be exactly in sync.

But the ‘file’ being played is hour(s) long, and not discrete items in a playlist. I’d 100% agree with you if each song were a discrete file in the Sonos stream. I really think we both agree that we’d love to see changes. ;)

Perhaps over time, things will change. 

I see what you’re saying.  Here’s a weird thing.  Day before Yesterday, I played the In the Absence Thereof station and heard a number of tracks I liked.  cool beans.  Then I heard a track that was annoying and realized I couldn’t skip it.  Darn!  Yesterday I played the station and got a track that’s like an hour long by itself.  It’s ok, but I want to hear the other tunes in the station without hearing the same hour long track first.  Now every time I restart it, it’s the same hourlong+ track that I heard yesterday.  That’s kind of terrible.  If I want to hear the whole selection of tunes, I will have to disable my alarms so I don’t have to restart at the beginning all the time.

I don’t know that the station is necessarily many many hours of a “radio show” in a single track or not, but it obviously changed between Wednesday and Thursday.