Sonos reworks Mac, PC Controller apps with mobile influence
updated 09:55 am EDT, Thu March 15, 2012
Sonos Controller 3.7 coming to computers
Sonos picked Thursday to preview an imminent, major reworking of its desktop Controller app for the Mac and PC. The new version bears much more in common with the mobile version, with an interface that's both more visually appealing and easier to use. It now has a unified, always-up search field that lets listeners filter by the Internet service, and it's possible to just drag one or more songs or whole albums to particular Sonos speakers to add them to the queue.
Some of the most popular secondary features have also now been surfaced to the top: alarms and the sleep timer are now directly accessible. Party Mode can now raise volume for multiple zones at once, and a new Mini Player can keep basic music controls always available without having to turn to the full app.
Moving to the heavily redesigned desktop app will involve a more modern platform and will require a minimum of either OS X Snow Leopard on Macs or Windows XP SP3 on PCs, along with at least one Sonos component like a Play:3. The release should be posted next week.
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Joined: Nov 2010
Except the mobile interface is terrible
I was hoping that this article was about how they were improving their mobile interface finally. There are many problems with it, in terms of unnecessary complexity and unintuitive features (that don't work in the same way depending on the source), like their playlist or when combining zones. I will never convince my wife to even pick up the remote let alone use it, when I have to struggle at times to et it to work. There are easy easy fixes, but this is designed for the tech types, by engineers... Nuff said.