Sonos Con:


It's effectively impossible to get it to play an XM stream indefinitely, as there is no way to send it a direct command to goto channel 36.
As was mentioned before, if you have multiple XM accounts for a corporate campus, the favorites are useless, as they are shared across the whole system.
You can set the 'alarm' to trigger every 4 hours, which will you allow recall a specific XM channel, but if there is any kind of network hiccup at the exact time of the alarm. the Sonos
will be unable to lock onto the stream and you'll get an audible chime coming out of all of your dist audio speakers.? Now someone onsite has to turn it off or it will keep going and going and goi.....

Autonomic Pro:

You have the ability to both monitor play status accurately and send the MMSProtocol commands that allow for direct reference of basically everything.
If the stream ever stops, you can just monitor the Stop Fb and trigger a terminate stream, reacquire stream sequence.

Excuse the extended commentary…

I’ve dealt with music server integration since the mid-90’s, starting with Arrakis (anyone remember that one??), and one thing I can say today is that digital music integration has become a total nightmare any way you slice it. For various reasons IMO, I see that solutions are either klunky, unintuitive, confusing, not consistent, or unreliable – often some/all of the above!

That said, we are charged with somehow making things work as best as possible. Here’s my take on the state of the art… There are only 2 serious players to integrate with (forgive me if I’ve missed one):

Sonos and Autonomic.

No clear winner, each has its Good and Bad – your choice has as much to do with your clients’ needs and their technical capabilities, as it does with business/integration issues. I think these are the only good choices, as they are the only players that seem to support pretty much all the major services that 99% of our clients want and USE!

Any device that doesn’t support Pandora is a non-starter, ex: Lode, BlueSound and Crestron NSP1…

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Both platforms integrate with ease:

__Using the Media Player Object (for better or worse!) and SMW Device/Logic symbols, one can get a system integrated and running in minutes, with multiple players – very scalable.

__Both support streaming services, and locally stored music on an HDD

__Both provide a clean, dynamic player transport interface with metadata

__Both operate as an AirPay Client FWIW (Sonos supports AirPlay2)

__Both allow Presets/Favorites to aggregate from any service – i.e. you can have a Pandora Channel, Spotify Playlist, Christmas Playlist that is sourced from a local HDD of music, all in one list.

__Both are profitable (30+ points)

__CON: Both have had ‘breaking firmware’ issues over time – Welcome to the Digital Age!

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Here’s some of my Pros/Cons for each with Crestron Integration:

SONOS

Pros:

__Great for ‘Simple’ Users, utilizing a ‘Radio Button’ style interface to select presets (Sonos Favorites)

__One button press, and you’re listening to music

__Supports Apple Music and AirPlay2

__’Power’ users can directly launch into the Sonos App (on TSW and Mobile) to select deep tracks, etc. or to add/change Sonos favorites. This is good because it shields the complexity from the daily ‘Simple’ user who just wants to listen to their favorite station.

__Hardware has generally been very reliable

Cons:

__The ‘Sonos System’ can not be managed remotely via VPN, so you cannot do set up, config and/or adjustment of services, Sonos Favorites, etc without being onsite

__Have to go to the Sonos App to set items in Favorites list

__Stable systems will sometimes stop working requiring a Crestron program restart. Many programmers have gone to putting the Sonos System modules in a separate program slot and restart regularly – this seems to help to stabilize things

__The Sonos Favorites List is a shared list, populated on all players in a system. Thus, multiple users will see all the favorites, not just their own

__You have to watch out for Network Config issues, Spanning Tree issues etc.

__Currently the integration API only supports 30 Favorites. It will display and play more, but this has been found to create unreliabilities. Supposedly the next update will expand this to 70

__Support from Sonos is questionable

__Sonos App on TSW panels have been deprecated. Still works but is a potential future issue.

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AUTONOMIC

Pros:

__The interface is great for the ‘Power’ user because it allows direct searching on the services

__Each Chassis supports a separate list of Favorites. I tend to spec individual MMS-1e players, one for each user – ex: (3) 1e’s vs (1) MMS-3e

__Support from SnapAV is pretty good for basic things. If you run into real issues, as I have, you have to know to push for advanced tech support from the NY office – there are still the original guys in the back room who can usually solve issues but you have to dig for them.

__MMS is built for integration

__Can be managed remotely via a VPN

Cons:

__Does not Support Apple Music and AirPlay2 (only AirPlay 1)

__Although the Creation of Favorites allows for simple, one-button selection, the MPO interface is more complicated for the average user than the Sonos interface

__More hardware issues than Sonos

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HTH!!? I’m sure I’ve missed some, please fill in the blanks…

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