Smart Home Blog

Sonos finally released its controller for Android-based devices. It looks nice and offers a full control over Sonos multi-room music system. User can choose different source for each audio zone as well as control playback and volume. The controller is already available on Android Market for free.

In the same time the Sonos added support of Apple AirPlay to its new firmware v3.4. It allows to stream from the Apple AirPlay, plugged into a Sonos device’s aux-in input, around the home.

If you own Crestron system or you’re Crestron integrator and by some reason you don’t like its multi-room functionality you may use budget Logitech’s Squeezeboxes. The Crestron module for SqueezeCenter will help you to do that. It’s written in SIMPL+ and can be compiled into a SIMPL Windows program. That program can be loaded by to the Crestron processor then.

I like Squeezebox devices and I’m very interested to hear some opinions people who tried that module practically. Will be very appreciated if you drop the comment.

Base LinuxMCE distribution includes Sqeezebox Control Center aka SlimServer. It allows to build multi-room audio system very easy. But Squeezeboxes are not so cheap as we’d like. So, Dianemo developers (company which offers commercial installations of LinuxMCE and returns back to community a lot of new and fixed functionality) implemented support of several sound cards (including USB ones) on one core or media director. Each card has one Squeezeslave (software implementation of Squeezebox) associated with it. As result using cheap USB sound cards you can build multi-room audio system.

Code to implement SoftAudio feature will be added to the project repository soon. So, hope we’ll have it in some new 0810 update next month.

Automated Home yesterday published a photo and brief description of new Sonos controller CR200. It has portrait orientation and sports color touchscreen display. To simplify charging of the device it comes with dock.

There is no word about price and availability of the CR200. But Sonos already created a new bundle – BU250, which is actually BU150 but with new controller. Zoneplayers hardware will be the same. They just will get a new color to meet with the CR200.

SmartUnity announced its new product – AudioMultiRoom application which will help you to create PC-based multiroom system with up to 12 independent zones. It offers following functionality:

• Supports up to 12 USB sound cards
• Auto detects sound card and creates an independent stereo-zone
• Supports Windows Media Player library (playlists, artists, covers etc.)
• API to work via TCP/IP interface (volume control, navigation, lists, status etc.)
• You can create your own Windows user interface using Microsoft Blend and AudioMultiRoom dll for Microsoft Blend
• Apple iPhone client (in development)