Features

The Control API enables you to take advantage of the following features.

Discover and manage groups

Players always work in groups, so the first thing that your app or hardware integration must do is discover all of the players and groups available in a household. The initial discovery occurs outside of the Control API, but once you've connected to a player, you can continue to discover and manage groups using the groups namespace (a namespace describes a set of related commands and events).

Display content metadata

Since Sonos can play content from many different sources, it's important to attribute the sources if you have an interface. You can also display other information about the content, included in the metadata, such as the artist, album, and name for a song, the author of a book, or the name of a podcast.

View and play Sonos favorites

Sonos users can mark their favorite content so they can call it up quickly on a player. These favorites act as presets. So they can quickly start a favorite radio station, album, or an audiobook they're in the middle of listening to by pressing a button. You can create an integration to take advantage of that and make it even easier.

View and play Sonos playlists

Sonos users can add tracks to playlists saved to their system. Your app or hardware integration can view the list of playlists in a household. Then it can and load and start playing a playlist as if the user selected the playlist using the Sonos app.

Control playback

Your integration can control sound playback. For example, you can start, stop, or pause sound on Sonos. You can skip from one song, podcast show, or audiobook chapter to another. Or you can seek within the content. You can also set the position of the playhead to start playing at a certain time within the content.

Control volume

Your integration can also control the volume of groups or individual players. Additionally, your integration can set a maximum for groups or individual players. Finally, if you offer an amp that connects with Sonos, you can set volume to pass through Sonos. When enabled, the player emits volume change events to event subscribers, but doesn't modify volume. You can monitor changes and change volume on your amp to match.

Play audio clips on Sonos

You can play short audio clips, such as an MP3 that  you provide using a custom URL, or a Sonos provided sound. Sonos may mix the clip with any playing content. Sonos does not support this capability on all devices.

Change source to line-in

You can change the current group source to the line-in source of a specified player. This can be be any player in the household that supports line-in. See Using Line-In on Sonos on the Sonos Support site for more details about the line-in capabilities of Sonos players.