The NVA Blog

I’ve had Sonos in the house for over a year now, and blogged about why were impressed here. They released version 2.0 of the software recently, and after playing with it for about two weeks it definitely gets the thumbs up. The biggest new feature is that Rhapsody is now integrated into the controller so that you can browse and play everything in the Rhapsody library as if it was in your own library. The integration is quite nice and performs well. They give you a free 30 day trial, and the service is $10 a month. It’s worth it for many reasons, but the easiest justification is that it will save you money in the long run. (cost of the Sonos system notwithstanding). How many times have you bought an album because you liked 1-2 songs but ended up not being all that impressed with the entire album? How many times have you bought some music, loved it for 3 weeks and haven’t listened to it again since? Rhapsody has a pretty big library at 2+ million songs (iTunes is 3.5m) so the likelihood of them having anything new from a major label is good. You can listen to tons of new music, decide what you like enough to pay for, and purchase media you want the CD or digital files for your iPod, car, etc.

Some other useful Sonos tidbits…

1. Wall Street Journal — last week WSJ gave Sonos the technical innovation of the year award for consumer electronics. Cool!
2. Alarm clock — The new 2.0 software update allows you to use your Sonos system as an alarm clock. Nice stereo fidelity instead of that harsh clock radio sound. Also able to set a different alarm for weekdays vs. weekends, multiple alarms per day, snooze, cancel, wake to music/playlist, etc. Now you have a reason to get another Sonos Zone Player for the bedroom.
3. Rhapsody Playlists - you can save tracks and albums to playlists just like with your own library. My wife love this feature because it makes it very easy to “bookmark” a song or album she liked while listening to one of the Rhapsody radio stations.

Fred Wilson also blogged about the 2.0 updates here and included some good screen shots to boot.

FYI - the 2.0 update is free if you already have the service, you can update the entire system from the controller

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 24th, 2006 at 6:03 pm and is filed under cool stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.