Tech Life of Recht

Lately, I’ve been working on my first real project for Android, a remote control for my Sonos system, so that I can finally get rid of my iPhone (which I am only using for that purpose).

This has been quite a learning experience, both in regard to Android and Sonos – Sonos is controlled using UPNP, so now I probably know much more about that than I’d ever want to. However, it seems to have paid off, because I finally have something that works, at least somewhat. Performance isn’t great, and some features are still missing, but that should all be fixable.

My plans are to build some extra last.fm support into the remote control, so that it can, for example, generate queues based on track popularity, display album/artist/track info, and much more. Already, album covers are retrieved from last.fm (I’ll probably change this so it checks the Sonos system first, at some point).

The features implemented now are: basic playback control (previous, next, play, pause), mute/unmute, volume control, adding/removing from queue, and browse available music. Most important missing feature is probably zone management, but hopefully, I’ll get time to fix that soon. Also, internet radio isn’t working, and it seems that you cannot change from radio to regular playlist.

The application is available on Android Market under the name Andronos, so if you own an Android phone and a Sonos system, please try it out. Any bugs or suggestions can be reported on the Google Code site. If you’re really ambitious, I’m also accepting patches (the project is open source, after all). The code is hosted at Gitorious, so just go ahead and check it out.