03.Aug.2021
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AmigaOS 4/MorphOS: Controlling Sonos speakers (update)
Michael Rupp, well-known by his Workbench simulation TAWS now has started a new project: Learning the programming language Hollywood.
Specifically, he is currently developing an application for AmigaOS 4 and MorphOS for controlling Sonos speaker.
The programm is called 'SonosController' and will have the following features:
- listing your speakers with the info of the currently playing song, with an icon that is downloaded from the speaker itself
- subscription of the speaker's UPnP events (that was probably the hardest one to crack, man-o-man), it means that the controller gets a notification if the Sonos system receives a command from some other controller (f.e. from your mobile or on some other computer) or directly from the speaker's buttons
- sending control commands:
- Play
- Pause
- Next
- Back
- Jump to time index
- Volume
- Mute
- Shuffle
- Repeat (everything, current song)
- Crossfade
- display of the current song's title, artist, and album on the selected speaker
- download and display of the album cover if possible (f.e. if embedded into the playing MP3 file)
- local cache for album covers for better performance
- local cache can be emptied in the Preferences dialog
- listing the selected speaker's current queue
- playing a song by clicking an entry in the queue
- listing the Sonos favourites incl. starting one
- listing the Sonos playlists incl. starting one (normal oder shuffled)
- listing TuneIn's saved radio stations incl. starting one
- listing TuneIn's saved radio shows incl. starting one
- browsing your music library incl. starting songs, albums, etc. (normal or shuffled)
- searching your music library by search string and search type (artist, album, composer, genre, song or imported playlist)
- the last x search strings are save, whereas x can be configured in the Preferences (0 - max. 50)
- saved search strings can be emptied in the Preferences dialog
According to the author, he "absolutely wanted to have an Amiga exclusive feature in it, something that the original Sonos app doesn't feature:
- Exporting playlists in M3U format. These can be put into your music library's "playlists" folder to be re-imported into Sonos, thus enabling you to kind of backup and restore your playlists.
All these features already have been implemented and currently are bug fixed. In future versions the following features will be added:
- grouping / ungrouping of speakers
- integration of music services such as Spotify, etc.
- modifying the current queue, adding songs (or whole playlists), remove songs, change song order
- save a queue as a new playlist
- modifying playlists (change, rename, delete, etc.)
- sleep timer functionality
- alarms functionality
- Ringho notifications
Regarding his experience with Hollywood, Rupp told us:
"I got into the new syntax very quickly, especially because the documentation is simply exemplary and full of sample code. Also, you can find an example for practically every programming aspect in the provided sample projects. And if I had any questions, I was always helped promptly in the Hollywood forum, be it by Andreas himself or other Hollywood programmers.
Hollywood is a programming language and so programming knowledge is necessary. Using the Hollywood Designer, however, you can do one or the other without, but this is more comparable to Scala or PowerPoint and is not a programming toolbox in the sense.
However, if you want to learn programming, I can recommend Hollywood as a starting point, especially because of the excellent documentation. Or you can click together something simple in the designer (a small slideshow or so) and then look at the generated script and try to understand what is going on."
Update: (05:53, 10.08.21, dr)
Michael Rupp emphazies that he is looking for beta testers. If you have a MorphOS or AmigaOS4 system and a Sonos speaker, then please contact him via mail. (dr)
[News message: 03. Aug. 2021, 20:24] [Comments: 0]
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