And probably should.Īnyway, I was able to configure Groove Music to work with my Sonos speaker. I actually have stupid amounts of OneDrive storage, so I could in fact take advantage of this. Microsoft lets you do this too, via OneDrive, but of course then you’re beholden to the limits of OneDrive storage. Services like iTunes (with iTunes Match), Google Play Music, and Amazon MP3 let you add your own music to a cloud collection and then you could just access it all from the one place. To be fair, this won’t be an issue for many people. It’s just separate unless you make a playback queue. But if I want to access music on my PC, or elsewhere on my home network, that is a separate Music Library entry in the Sonos software. If I want to play music I’ve acquired from or subscribed to with Groove, as well as music in OneDrive, I can add Groove as a service to the Sonos controller software and do so. I just can’t “see” all of the music at the same time, of course. But the Sonos Controller software also lets you construct a playback queue that includes music from multiple sources, which is actually really neat and not possible with just Groove, of course. In Sonos, I can access all of that music, too. All of this music is presented as a single, consolidated music collection in the Groove app. And I can arbitrarily access any music that is on my PC or anywhere else on my home network, since the Groove lets you configure where it looks for your local collection. I can access music that I’ve copied to OneDrive. I can access music I’ve added to my cloud collection via my Groove Music Pass subscription. But that makes sense, and leads to some interesting possibilities.įor example, with Groove on my PC, I can access the music I’ve purchased from Groove (or its predecessors, Zune Music Store and Xbox Music Store). Yes, you have to jump in and out of each music service/source. You don’t get a single view of all of your music, depending on how you organize things, but you can in fact access all of it. This kind of variety and support is excellent. So Groove temporarily has this one advantage over the industry darling.) (Curiously, Apple Music is not supported by Sonos yet. Each of these services is supported by Sonos, and you can also access music that is located on the device you’re using to control the speaker(s) as well as music that is located on a media share of some kind on the home network. I also have subscriptions to Pandora and Spotify. I have music in Amazon MP3, Microsoft Groove, and Google Play Music. We’ll see.) You may in fact want to configure the system on multiple devices, since you also control what the speaker(s) play through the Sonos Controller software.įor people with music in many places, this can get interesting. (Sonos users tell me routinely that these speakers are addictive, and that I will be adding to this one-speaker system over time. (I suspect this type of thing never bothers the typical Apple user, and to be fair, the quality of this system is indeed high.)īasically, you plug-in the speaker and, using a Sonos app on Android or iOS, or a desktop application on Windows or Mac, you configure it as a new system or add it to an existing system. Instead, Sonos creates a system, a walled garden of sorts, that is elegant and powerful but also a bit restrictive. So you can’t just walk up to the PLAY:1 with any arbitrary handset and start playing music. The device is Wi-Fi (or Ethernet) only, and it can only be controlled via Sonos (or, on Windows phones, third-party) software. There are no Bluetooth or NFC capabilities here. That is, you can pair them with any handset over NFC/Bluetooth (simple) or just straight Bluetooth (sometimes difficult), but you can also just plug-in a standard 3.5 mm audio cable. As a long-time user of various Nokia/Microsoft standalone NFC/Bluetooth speakers–we still use a Nokia Play 360 in the bathroom, and I travel with a portable Nokia MD-12 when on the road–I sort of appreciate the versatility of this kind of device. The PLAY:1 is also as simple as an Apple product, with very few hardware buttons and as minimal port selection. It’s an attractive and clearly high-end device, and one can immediately understand why the same audience that gravitates towards Apple’s devices also make up the bulk of the Sonos customer base. The PLAY:1 is a mono speaker, but you can pair it with another PLAY:1 and, through the system’s software controls, configure them as a stereo set. Sonos also makes larger PLAY:3 ($300) and PLAY:4 ($400) speakers, which the company says offer bigger sound (of course) and stereo sound. Starting small, I decided to purchase a white Sonos PLAY:1 ( it’s available in black as well), which is the firm’s physically smallest and, at $200, least-expensive speaker.
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