I recently acquired a set of Sonos speakers. After setting up the Plex service in the Sonos app I quickly noticed that the user experience in there is way, way subpar when compared to the actual Plex app. Filtering, sorting and plain browsing is just not as good as the real thing. I tried to use AirPlay to stream to my Sonos but, again there are some pretty big drawbacks. Mostly, it is streaming from my phone to my speaker and not from my plex server to my speaker. This means that if anything steals the audio on my phone, the Sonos will stop playing. Plus, I can’t do it from my Windows PC.
Sonos have a very good solution for this which I believe they call Sonos Direct Control. This is an API for in app integration of the Sonos player. I heard that Spotify supports it but I don’t really known about other apps doing it yet and I don’t have a Spotify account to check.
If this is really a thing and plex could add support for Sonos Direct Control, both on mobile and on the web app, it would really be the best of both world. We would get actual Sonos to Server playback, with the much better Plex user experience, on potentially every platform that Plex supports.
I would really love to see this added to the app.
