Posts Tagged ‘sonos’

Pretty gutted that after seven months of having my Sonos Playbar, it died.

Sonos were very good about it. I spoke to them on the phone and we tried a few things to no response. After that they send me through a return request that came with a pre-paid UPS sticker, so I just had to wrap it up and schedule a collection from UPS. They even shipped me a new one straight away, though that did require a credit card pre-authorisation.

Pretty annoying though, if that happens just after the warranty runs out, I will be very unhappy.

I’m really enjoying my Sonos system. Being able to play music throughout the whole house is amazing as I regularly move from room to room.

However the support for Audible audiobooks is not very good. The way it works is that you link your Audible account to your Sonos. Then, every time you buy an audiobook, you have to download it, load it into your music library and then you can play it. It then just treats it like a song so it does not remember your place or understand any of the meta data.

Compared to the Audible software, where new books just appear on the list and download and playing with one click, it is just an unusably bad experience. Audible also has chapter and marker supports and remembers your place in each audiobook that you are listening to.

Luckily, there is a solution. If you have a line-in on one of your components, such as the Sonos PLAY:5, and an Apple AirPort Express, you can take the line-out from your AirPort Express and then feed it into your Sonos.

Once this is done, you can use AirPlay to direct the output from your iPhone, iPad or Mac and it goes into your Sonos and plays through all of your Sonos system – not just the one you fed it into. This means you can use the Audible software and still play it across your entire Sonos.

There is a definitely delay added by the latency of the two systems combined. It takes a few seconds between me pressing play or stop on my iPhone for it to actually happen. But that seems to be the only drawback, and is not really much of one.

Using AirPort Utility, you can name the AirPort Express line-out anything you want. I have now renamed it to Sonos, so that is what I get on the list on AirPlay.