Setting Up Sonos To Tweet

How's this for taking an idea to it's (il)logical conclusion. A few days ago I had friends over, and of course the Sonos was on and the playlist was fed with all sorts of stuff. Some songs even got that "who was that, I should check them out" reaction. So I thought I'd be nice and just email the playlist. Which wasn't going to work. While I can save the "currently playing" queue as a playlist, Sonos saves playlists in its own format on the Sonos itself. And with no export option, you have to resort to old-fashioned techniques of writing it down or screen-grabbing to get a "you have been listening to" report. And then I noticed Sonos's Twitter integration feature...

Guessing that I could try getting the Sonos to just tweet to a protected Twitter account (some music preferences are not for sharing to all) and pick up playlist info when I needed it, I went and set one up. Easy, just go register one with Twitter. Needed an email address too, but no problem, I just used one of the spare accounts I keep around for signing up and collecting spam. A quick visit to the Sonos menus to hook up the new Twitter account and everything was ready. Except, Mr. Sonos doesn't seem to want to tweet automatically.

Really, all you get is a very basic Twitter client on your Sonos controller (which a lot of the time will be a laptop or tablet/smartphone with its own better Twitter client). You can get Sonos to tweet the name of the current song/artist, but that's about all. It can be four or five clicks to get Sonos to tweet what's playing just using the in-built tweet templates, and they're really boring. You can't change them to include other tags like the album name, or to personalise them. They suggest a generic #Sonos (rather than something like #PlayingOnMySonos) hashtag to make tracking of Sonos conversations on Twitter that bit harder. And they even suggest a "X is playing all over my house" tweet when something is only playing in one zone, which is a bit dumb. So if you don't want tedious tweets, you have to type them yourself. Which defeats the point of the machine doing the tweeting.

So back to the original plan - to get a list of what's just been playing off the Sonos. It doesn't seem to be possible, without resorting to advanced technology like the pen. The best I can probably get is to use the Sonos to pre-populate a tweet when something interesting comes on, and then check the tweets later.

Anyway, I have a machine in my house hooked up to Twitter, but that's probably the end of the experiment. I might leave the account running though, just to see if any other machines want to be friends with a little white box in my living room....