Airport Extreme and Sonos: an unhappy pairing
We picked up a Sonos system a few months back to audition it for our new home as a “whole house” audio system. I put that in quotes because we’ve wired for the whole house, but will only buy hardware for select rooms. The system is a series of distributed controllers that can read mp3 files from windows filesystems on the network. Great, I thought. I’ll plug a drive into my Airport Extreme base station and it’ll act like a NAS and I won’t need a dedicated server. Brilliant!
Unfortunately, Sonos has a little bug: it can’t connect to the Airport disk. My Mac can. My Windows XP box can. What’s wrong with Sonos? I called their tech support people and was told that they couldn’t connect to the Airport disk because of (I kid you not) a problem with Apple’s USB connector! I asked to talk to the next tier of support and was told that Apple messed up the Samba protocol. I asked why my XP box could connect, then, and they said they didn’t know.
I finally got a more-reasonable sounding answer on the forums: the Airport Extreme doesn’t properly support Samba user-level authentication and the Sonos doesn’t properly support unauthenticated/user-level authenticated access. Great. So much for that plan. By the time I finally discovered all this, the return period on both items had expired, so I’m stuck for now. I’ll probably have a server in the new house anyway, if only to serve iTunes content to the TV.
UPDATE: Thomas Meyer at Sonos wrote to tell me that they’d released new software to improve compatibility with airport extreme. I haven’t tested it, as I’m now serving my music from a dedicated Leopard server (which also serves for Time Machine backups).