We are an unapologetic Apple house. Phones, tablets, computers, even an AppleTV in the family room. When you use Apple products in the manner which they are designed they really do just work.
That being said, when you start to do things that the folks in Cupertino hadn’t planned on, it gets challenging. This is also probably true for Windows environments, but Mac users are really accustomed to things that just work.
My wife and I are old enough that we have a fairly significant CD collection. Steve Jobs once said that people don’t want to rent music and statement still describes me pretty well. Apple wants to keep the iTunes media files in your personal folder, but she and I share a single laptop with separate user accounts. I did’t want to have two music libraries on the same laptop, so challenge one was convincing the computer to keep the music on a network drive.
We recently added our first Sonos speakers to the network. They can run as either AirPlay speakers or as Sonos units. AirPlay is great, if you want to use a phone, tablet or computer to run the music. Any audio you have running on your device, you can feed to the speakers. That being said, if you’re streaming music from your phone and a call comes in, the music stops.
The Sonos speakers have enough processor built into them to independently stream music, as long as they can find it. It’s trivial to add a streaming service to the Sonos app, and one of the services I added was the network drive where our music collection is stored; but this brought up challenge two.
The iTunes library is a database file which points at the individual music files. You can customize the library using the “Information” panels so that Roger Waters’ & David Gilmour’s solo works are sorted with the Pink Floyd albums. You can also use the information panel so that artists who have guest vocalists get sorted with the primary artist. (Eminem featuring D12, should be sorted with Eminem, not as a separate artist.)
Sonos isn’t that sophisticated. Sonos scans the folders you indicate as your music storage and build it’s own database. There is no way for the solo artists to be listed with the group they are known for. And the hip-hop artists that have a lot of guests end up multiplying
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Modern Anachronist 