SONOS – schrankmonster blog

use case #3 – sonos auto bookmarker for audiobooks and podcasts

Posted on August 11, 2017January 13, 2019 by Daniel Kirstenpfad

So you’re listening to this audio book for a while now, it’s quite long but really thrilling. In fact it’s too long for you to go through in one sitting. So you pause it and eventually listen to it on multiple devices.

We’ve got SONOS in our house and we’re using it extensively. Nice thing, all that connected goodness. It’s just short of some smart features. Like remembering where you paused and resuming a long audio book at the exact position you stopped the last time. Everytime you would play a different title it would reset the play-position and not remember where you where.

With some simple steps the house will know the state of all players it has. Not only SONOS but maybe also your VCR or Mediacenter (later use-case coming up!).

Putting together the strings and you get this:

Whenever there’s a title being played longer than 10 minutes and it’s paused or stopped the smart house will remember who, where and what has been played and the position you’ve been at.

Whenever that person then is resuming playback the house will know where to seek to. It’ll resume playback, on any system that is supported at that exact position.

Makes listening to these things just so much easier.

Bonus points for a mobile app that does the same thing but just on your phone. Park the car, go into the house, audiobook will continue playback, just now in the house instead of the car. The data is there, why not make use of it?

p.s.: big part of that I’ve opensourced years ago: https://github.com/bietiekay/sonos-auto-bookmarker

the xenim streaming network SONOS integration now plays recent shows!

Posted on July 31, 2015January 13, 2019 by Daniel Kirstenpfad

Since I am frequently using the xenim streaming network service but I was missing out on the functionality to replay recent shows. With the wonderful functionality of Re-Live made available through ReliveBot I have now added this replay feature and I am using it a lot since.

Within the SONOS controller app it looks like this:

To set-up this service with your SONOS set-up just follow the instructions shown here: a new Music Service for SONOS

Source 1: xenim streaming network
Source 2: ReliveBot
Source 3: Download the Custom Service
Source 4: a new Music Service for SONOS

a new Music Service for SONOS: xenim streaming network

Posted on August 19, 2014January 13, 2019 by Daniel Kirstenpfad

I am a frequent podcast live-stream listener. And being that I am enjoying the awesome service called xenim streaming network.

Any Podcast producer can join the xsn and with that can live-stream his own Podcast while recording. It’s CDN is based on voluntarily provided resources and pretty rock-solid as far as my experience with it goes.

Since I am a frequent user of this – and I’ve got that gorgeous SONOS hardware scattered around my house – I thought I need to have that service integrated into my SONOS set.

The SONOS system knows the concept of “Music Services”. There are quite a lot of them but xsn is missing. But SONOS is awesome and they got an API!

Unfortunately the API documentation is hidden behind a NDA wall so that would be a no-go. What’s not hidden is what the SONOS controllers have to discuss with all the existing services. Most of the time these do not use HTTPS so we’re free to listen to the chatters. I did just that and was able, for the sake of interoperability, to reverse engineer the SONOS SMAPI as far as it is necessary to make my little xsn Music Service work.

As usual you can get the source-code distributed freely through Github. If you’re not into that sort of compiling and programming things, you are invited to use my free-of-charge provided service. To set it up on your home SONOS just follow these simple steps:

Step 1: Start your SONOS Controller Application and find out the IP address of your SONOS.

Click on “About My Sonos System” and check the IP address written next to the “Associated ZP”.

Step 2: Add the xsn Music Service.

By opening a browser window and browsing to: http://<your-associated-zp-ip>:1400/customsd.htm

When you’re there – fill out the fields as below. The SID is either 255, or if you used that previously, something between 240-253. The service name is “xenim streaming network”. The Endpoint URL and Secure Endpoint URL both are http://xsn.schrankmonster.de/xsn

Set the Polling interval to 30 seconds. Click on the Anonymous Authentication SOAP header policy and you’re good to go. Click on “send” to finish.

Step 3: Add the new Music Service to your SONOS Controller.

Click on “Add Music Services” and click through until you see “xenim streaming network”. Add the service and you’re set!

p.s.: It’s normal that the service icon is a question mark.

Step 4: Enjoy Live Podcasts!

Source 1: https://github.com/bietiekay/sonos-xsn-service
Source 2: http://streams.xenim.org/

How to get a list of all recent Podcasts on SONOS

Posted on July 2, 2014January 13, 2019 by Daniel Kirstenpfad

I am using an external podcast download tool to stay updated on all podcasts I subscribed to. For this purpose SubSonic is a good choice – actually for a lot more also.

One of the quirks of the SONOS products is that Podcasts are not really well supported. In fact there is no support at all.

So I wrote a tool that extends the SONOS players with the functionality to “remember” play positions within audiobooks and podcasts. Now what’s left to properly have podcasts supported is a view of the most recently updated podcasts. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a “Folder View” in the SONOS controller of what’s new across all the different podcasts you are subscribed to?

Now here’s the trick:

Use a small script on any RaspberryPi in the house to dynamically create hardlinks to the podcasts files in a “Recently Updated Podcasts” folder.

The script is something like this:

find /where-your-podcasts-are/ -type f -printf ‘%TY-%Tm-%Td %TT %p\n’ | sort | tail -n 25 | cut -c 32- | sed -e “s/^/ln \”/” -e “s/$/\”/” -e “s/$/ \”\/recentPodcasts\/\”/” | sh

This short line will go through all folders and subfolders in /where-your-podcasts-are/ and then create Hardlinks in /recentPodcasts to the most recent 25 files.

That way, and when /recentPodcasts/ is made accessible to your SONOS controllers, you’ll have something like this:

Source 1: http://www.subsonic.org
Source 2: play position bookmarker

using the RaspberryPi to make all SONOS speakers support Apple Airplay

Posted on June 25, 2014January 13, 2019 by Daniel Kirstenpfad

Airplay allows you to conveniently play music and videos over the air from your iOS or Mac OS X devices on remote speakers.

Since we just recently “migrated” almost all audio equipment in the house to SONOS multi-room audio we were missing a bit the convenience of just pushing a button on the iPad or iPhones to stream audio from those devices inside the household.

To retrofit the Airplay functionality there are two options I know of:

1: Get Airplay compatible hardware and connect it to a SONOS Input.

airportexpress_2012_back-285111 You have to get Airplay hardware (like the Airport Express/Extreme,…) and attach it physically to one of the inputs of your SONOS Set-Up. Typically you will need a SONOS Play:5 which has an analog input jack.

PLAY5_back

2: Set-Up a RaspberryPi with NodeJS + AirSonos as a software-only solution

You will need a stock RaspberryPi online in your home network. Of course this can run on virtually any other device or hardware that can run NodeJS. For the Pi setting it up is a fairly straight-forward process:

You start with a vanilla Raspbian Image. Update everything with:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade

Then install NodeJS according to this short tutorial. To set-up the AirSonos software you will need to install additional avahi software. Especially this was needed for my install:

sudo apt-get install git-all libavahi-compat-libdnssd-dev

You then need to get the AirSonos software:

sudo npm install airsonos -g

After some minutes of wait time and hard work by the Pi you will be able to start AirSonos.

sudo airsonos

And it’ll come up with an enumeration of all active rooms.

Screen Shot 2014-06-25 at 11.38.47

And on all your devices it’ll show up like this:

and

Screen Shot 2014-06-25 at 12.38.27

Source: https://github.com/stephen/airsonos

I give you: the SONOS Audiobook / Podcast Auto Bookmarker – never lose your Listening Progress again…

Posted on March 23, 2014January 13, 2019 by Daniel Kirstenpfad

Since the SONOS system I’ve bought turned out to be highly hackable I’ve spent some quality-time this weekend fixing the worst downside I’ve found so far that the SONOS system had for me

I am listening to a lot of Podcasts and Audiobooks. And it turns out that those two Genre are not particularly good supported by SONOS. When you’re listening to a 4 hour podcast and you stop it to play a song in between (since you stretch the listening of that podcast to several days) the next time you start that 4 hour podcast the SONOS system did not remember the position that you stopped at the last time and restarts the podcast from the beginning.

If you did not remember where you left of the last time, you’re lost. The same goes for Audiobooks.

Now this is the first feature I am teaching my SONOS system. And I am opensourcing it so you can do it as well.

Everything you need can be run on a RaspberryPi:

You need NodeJS and node-sonos-http-api installed and running.
You need MONO and sonos-auto-bookmarker (change the configuration.json file in bin/Debug after you xbuilded the .sln file)

Now the Auto Bookmarker Tool will, with the help of the sonos-http-api, monitor your household and whenever something longer than 10 minutes is played and stopped it bookmarks the last played position. Whenever you restart that track it will then seek to the last known position automatically.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eqk3SyNv8sE[/youtube]

Source 1: https://github.com/bietiekay/sonos-auto-bookmarker

Let the SONOS hacking begin!

Posted on March 22, 2014January 13, 2019 by Daniel Kirstenpfad

I always wanted a networked multi-room audio solution as you can easily see here and here and here and here. Now it seems I’ve finally found something that integrates very well into our music listening habits and our infrastructure. And on top of that it turned out to be highly hackable.

I’ve went with SONOS for that multi-room solution. After trying two speakers for two rooms I’ve invested the budget into the full-house solution (not all speakers on below picture). And finally everything is as I always wanted.

Be warned: If you buy one speaker, you will definitly buy more.

So what’s in those boxes? Besides beautiful and high-quality speakers there’s a 250 Mhz linux powered computer inside each speaker. It got 64Mbytes of memory and wireless adapters to span it’s own wireless mesh network (hidden by default).

Each speaker on it’s own can be controlled and accessed through the SONOS controller applications (Windows/Mac/iOS/Android) or through several tools that open up new possibilities.

Screen Shot 2014-03-22 at 17.52.10

There will be more articles coming on the topic of hacking SONOS, adding functionality and using it for things not officially planned for by the manufacturer. Joy!

Update:

Source 1: http://splok.org/sonos_interface