I’ve already said I will install Sonos in the farmhouse. The home office and the living room will have studio quality monitor speakers from Bowers & Wilkins (commonly known as B&W) and the whole house plus shop and deck will have ceiling speakers (thanks to monoprice). I have a test setup as I research installation details specific to the in-ceiling speakers. During my tests, I have also been working on “content management”. Here is what I’ve learned and what puts a smile on my face <giddily> …

• iTunes management of my digitized music library
• Genius to generate playlists of my music library
• WBUR and C-SPAN streaming radio
• last.fm for music and discovering new artists

The addition of last.fm is very recent. I had tried streaming music in the past but the quality and bandwidth were terrible. Things have definitely changed. I am guessing it is a combination of improvements in bandwidth as well as streaming technology.

It seems SONOS and last.fm were meant to meet, fall in love, and get married. I surely hope they have a long and passionate relationship!

Getting the two together was not as intuitive as I expected. Even Google was not much help getting the these two together for their first date. I finally found how to ignite the spark …

1. [First] go sign-up for a last.fm account
2. [Configuration via the SONOS CR100 controller] System Settings –> Music Service Setup –> Add
3. [Select] last.fm
4. [Enter] user name
5. [Enter] password
6. [Press] OK

This will add last.fm as a new source on the music menu. From there, you can enter an artist name and “play music like this” or browse tags and listen to associated music. Both methods work great. I entered James Taylor and listened for a while. I also gave Imogen Heap a long play. Later, I tried some of the pre-existing tags; “female vocalists” did a good job of hitting some of my favorite artists as well as exposing me to some new ones (although Blondie was a bit of an ear shock after many of the more alternative style tracks).

As much as SONOS works well with digitized music libraries, I’m finding I use it much more for streaming NPR and now last.fm – and happy happy happy.

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