| I entered the Sonos ecosystem in 2005. There were many solutions that would allow you to play your music collection from SMB/Samba but the Sonos was unique in that it didn't require a piece of server-side "helper" software. You see, in 2005 decoding mp3 took some horsepower and these stripped down streamer devices didn't have enough. This meant you had to run some transcoder "server" on your fileserver just to send it over to the speaker. Of course those software pieces were Windows based, etc. So the Sonos was special: it had enough horsepower to handle mp3 compression and you could just point them at SMB and it would just work. The first sign of trouble was a circa 2008 UI redesign they did to the desktop client ... all OS primitives and OS UI elements were removed and some "expert" clearly attempted to reimplement every normal UI element in their own "modern" way. Now fast-forward to the present where, although you can use the desktop client you cannot set up the speakers or even name them without using a phone app. I say this in all seriousness: I hate what Sonos did to their product so much that I have considered buying and donating their equipment to engineers and paying them to reverse engineer and publish everything that can be learned about their entire tech stack. |