At long last, the world’s best digital music system has fixed a glaring UI hole. With today’s release of v2.5 of their software, Sonos controllers (both hardware remotes and PC/Mac based software) can search for music by artist, composer, album, or track. This feature works within your own local library or within music services such as Rhapsody.
Up until now if you wanted to listen to an artist in Rhapsody that you hadn’t previously bookmarked, you would need to guess what top-level genre they were categorized under and then scroll through an enormous list to try to find the artist. How many times have I scratched my head asking questions like "Is Pink Floyd Rock/Pop or Alternative/Punk?" Much easier was to find a web browser, pull up http://www.rhapsody.com/pinkfloyd and bookmark music into your library. That human-writable URL scheme is still one of my favorite accomplishments in the last several years.
I started beta testing this release last week. As always, the update was fast, easy and works flawlessly. My biggest complaint is that the search is not interactive. Considering how fast results typically come back, I would much prefer to have a type-ahead style search where results start to appear as you type. This would be especially useful considering the somewhat painful scroll-wheel-alphabet typing interface they provide.
Sonos is a great company that makes fabulous products. They continue to advance the state-of-the-art in digital music systems. By adding Napster support they have taken another step to commoditize Rhapsody’s music subscription product. They’ve also released a new product called a ZoneBridge which acts as a WiFi range extender which would address one of my biggest complaints about the system.