Sonos offers updated music controller to Fandroids for testing Streaming Wi-Fi speaker whiz Sonos is testing an updated version of its smartphone/tablet app, with beta test software now available to Android phone users. New Sonos phone app Forthcoming phone controller app The new features in the app include: search for music tracks enabled across all services, refreshed design with …
Its the official Sonos photo so it's not El Reg's fault if it's a load of nonsense. About time Sonos updated their apps; they are horrific right now - the only flaw in an otherwise excelent system. Actully, threre's another flaw - the lack of sensible Airplay support, but I don't suppose they'll be rectifying that anytime soon.
@Angry of Scotland I rather like the Android and the Mac controllers but then I'm entirely biased by the whole Sonos experience. I'm really impressed by kit that can set up its own internet bridge, stream to and from my hifi, set up a wireless mesh network for more speakers and then just work. I'm prepared to forgive the odd little idiosyncrasy and, heavens, it's *much* more usable that iTunes!
I use the existing Android app and to be honest once you learn the slightly weird navigation it's actually pretty good. It's not the quickest to load so I also have a 3rd party widget that allows you to control the Sonos quickly through your home screen (though I'm pretty sure the app has had it's own widget for a while).
I haven't spent too much time playing with the new app but it has a pretty clean look and and the navigation does seem to be improved.
Since Amazon and 7digital streaming are both already supported I suspect that Google Music will be along within the next year.
While an updated Android app is all well and good it was much lower down on my wishlist than a Linux client and proper BBC iPlayer support. Live radio is great through TuneIn but the catchup library available for the BBC leaves a lot to be desired, more often than not I just plug my phone into a Sonos load the iPlayer app and re-direct the Line in to whichever rooms I want to listen in.
As a former studio recording engineer whose computer is at the heart of their sound system, and as an avid streaming music subscriber, I'm very interested in options that will let normal folks take advantage of the high quality of sound available.
But the commercial solutions I've seen all seem to have seriously compromised fidelity in terms of both the units, but, more crucially, in terms of their internal digital-to-analog converters (DACs), which tend to be stuck at the same, highly degraded level as many other consumer devices like the sound in consumer computers, tablets, and phones.
Even the 320 kbps lossy compression streams sent by better subscription services reveal the typically poor quality of these converters.
Devices costing several hundred dollars -- as many of these do -- should have better than the "50 cent" converters so typically found in consumer devices.
We don't need quad sample rates or other nonsense -- CD audio is entirely capable of delivering better sound than ~99.9% of the stereos out there can deliver -- but until regular folks have at least decent quality digital converters in their devices, their sound will be fundamentally compromised.
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