Sonos + Rhapsody = Crazy Delicious

A few years ago, I was pretty excited to pick up my first Apple Airport Express, so I could start streaming music from iTunes straight into my stereo system at home, instead of through my tiny laptop speakers. I liked it so much, I picked up a second Airport Express and a cheap bookshelf stereo system so I could also stream music into my office. I like to listen to music while I work, but headphones distract me, and for reasons that are best left to the realm of Weird and Irrational Artist Ooga Booga™, I need to have music come from some place other than my computer or desk, and the Airport Express was perfect for this.

The system served me well for a very long time. I added a nifty app called Airfoil to my Mac, which enabled me to take any audio source from my computer and stream it to an Airport Express, so I could listen to my favorites at Magnatune.com, as well as some online radio stations that only had web-based players like KROQ of the 80s. I could also take my last.fm player or Pandora, and stream them. Then, about 8 months ago, something went all hinky (that’s a technical term) with the airport card in my Macbook, and streaming music was like watching anything in the realplayer circa 1997: buffering … buffering … buffering … and now we’re crashing.

Sonos: Decidedly Not Hinky

I went on a quest for an alternative, and ended up with the Sonos Multi-Room Music System. Sonos is, as the product description implies, a system that makes it easy to stream music all over your house. You do this by defining zones (living room, kitchen, office, bedroom, etc.) and attaching a Sonos player to each one. Once you’re set up, you can stream different content to each zone, or link them all together for something called Party Mode (woo). This lets the damn kids in your house listen to whatever it is the damn kids today listen to out in the living room, while you listen to something sensible in your office while you work, like The Circle Jerks. It’s almost as easy to set up as the Netflix Player from Roku, and the controller software for the iPhone/iPod Touch is really slick.

Sonos accomplished all the tasks I missed from Airport + Airfoil, plus it gave me access to about 25,000 online radio stations from all over the world, searchable by country, genre, and even by program. You obviously don’t need a Sonos to listen to all those stations because they’re already online, but the interface makes it as easy to search the entire planet for a station as it is to spin the dial on your car stereo during your morning commute; there’s something outrageously cool about listening to a classic rock station from Japan and then tuning into a local music show from a former Eastern Bloc country while you’re waiting for the Joe Frank show to start.

Sonos also seamlessly integrates support for major online music services, like Pandora and Last.fm (bonus feature: it’ll scrobble eveything you play, if you want it to, increasing the relevance of your recommended stations quite a bit), as well as Napster and Rhapsody. I was curious about Rhapsody, because my friend John Scalzi has been praising it incessantly since digital watches were a pretty neat idea. I activated the 30 day free trial, and I haven’t looked back. I’m sorry I ever doubted you, John, because Rhapsody is awesome, and Rhapsody + Sonos changed the way I listened to music at home, even more so than when I discovered Pandora, or bought my first Slacker Media Player.

Rhapsody, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Yacht Rock

If you’re like I was until recently, and don’t know much about Rhapsody, allow me to explain. Wait, there is no time. Let me sum up: it’s a subscription-based music service with different types of membership. I have the streaming membership.For $13 a month, I get access to a music library that spans nearly a century of recordings, in every genre I could ever want, by thousands of artists I love (and many that I don’t care about; Jesus Jones, I’m looking in your direction.) I can search the library for specific artists, tracks, and albums, adding things I like or find interesting to my personal library. I can also listen to hundreds of different commercial-free, genre-specific stations, just like the ones I make with Slacker or listen to on satellite. It’s pretty awesome. If I get the crazy urge to listen to Hall and Oates (it happens more often than you’d think), if I’m curious if the new Depeche album is any good (it’s not), or if I wonder what the big deal is about Amy Winehouse (guilty pleasure, I’ll admit it right now and blame Secret Diary of a Call Girl) I can be listening in a matter of minutes, and when I get on some crazy Yacht Rock kick, I can quickly and easily build a playlist without investing a hundred bucks that I’m going to regret as soon as I realize that I’m listening to Yacht Rock. Oh! And I can also listen to stations inspired by artists, so if I get in the mood for some nice Bauhaus-inspired gloom, I just load up the Bauhaus artist station and let the Love & Rockets carry me all the way to Skinny Puppy.

Is Rhapsody worth the monthly fee? It is for me, without a doubt. My musical tastes are so diverse – it’s easier to just tell you that I don’t like Top 40 and Country than it is to tell you all the stuff I do like – I have built an immense library that takes up almost as much storage space as my comic book collection. Rhapsody is perfect for letting me virtually drag out all my 70s punk records, or my Grateful Dead live shows, or even my embarrassingly-comprehensive collection of lounge music whenever the mood strikes me.

Now, here’s the thing about Rhapsody’s streaming membership: you don’t own the music you add to your library, and when you stop paying the subscription fee, it goes away. But … so what? I don’t use it in place of actually purchasing albums, anyway. I know what I’m getting into, and if I like something so much that I want to own it, well … I buy it, usually from Amazon’s MP3 store (which really needs to incorporate simple gifting of albums via e-mailed online gift certificate, like the iTunes Music Store.)

Wonder Twins, Activate

I probably wouldn’t be as happy with Sonos and Rhapsody as I am if I had them in isolation of each other, but joining them together makes a musical baby that’s so beautiful, you’ll want to take it home and pet it and hug it and love it and call it George.

However, all this praise and heaping, bucket of stinky panda love aside, there is a huge, glaring, you-have-got-to-be-kidding me drawback to the whole thing: Sonos is incredibly expensive. If you’re looking for a way to get music from your computer and the internet into your home stereo system, there are other options which are less expensive…and less elegant. You absolutely get what you pay for in this technological arena, though, and I believe Sonos delivers the very best bang for the buck, especially when you team it up with Rhapsody. Like Slacker and Pandora before that, it’s fundamentally changed the way I listen to and find music.

Wil Wheaton is quite content, now a little bit older.