Sonos today announced that the latest version of their home music devices now support streaming music from Rhapsody. We have previously written about Sonos and a couple of weeks ago we spent some time with the two founders of the company talking about the future direction of the company, what their plans are and getting insight into this latest release. As we previously mentioned, Sonos is one of the easiest and best hardware devices we have seen that mix digital music, net connectivity and good quality sound.
The new integration with Rhapsody (which is a product of Real Networks) gives users the ability to stream any of the 2 million+ songs and 100+ ad-free radio stations right onto their Sonos device. Traditionally, Sonos would crawl all your local network shares and index your music – but now with Rhapsody you can just pick any song and play it without the need for local storage. In terms of pricing, every Sonos 2.0 user will be able to try out the service free for 30 days, after which they must pay 9.99 for the unlimited service from Rhapsody.
Since being founded in early 2002 and launching in January of 2005, Sonos has been growing from strenght-to-strength. The product currently sells in over 25 countries and they have offices in the Netherlands and Boston. They currently have 500 retail locations in the US. The UK is their second largest market.
Other features from the new Sonos include:
- Mac, Linux and PC users can now enjoy Rhapsody in every room.
- Discover new music with Rhapsody’s Artist Radio.
- Built-in music charts.
- Create an instant music library.