Sonos controller for BlackBerry and Nokia

I was really not happy with the way the Libary view looked in 1.0.3, and I am still mindful that one reviewer of Tiggit Controller referred to the user interface as shameful. So I have been re-working the Library view so that it works a bit more like the user interface on the iPhone and the Sonos Controller.

Here are some initial screenshots, I am open to suggestions and feedback. Here is the first Library screen.

When you select Albums, you are presented with the full list of albums within your library. You can scroll down, or use the keyboard to jump the first album starting with that letter. In the view below I pressed M.

Having found the album I want, I then select the album. As you may recall, tiggit controller does not download all of the tracks in an album, until it needs it, so there is a short delay while the track list is loaded

Once the track list is loaded it is displayed to allow you to click to add to the queue or use the menu to select Play now.

One other consideration is whether to show album art on the album list. Whilst this is technically straight forward, it may have a performance impact, and tiggit controller will need to get the art from the Sonos, as well as needing to cache it locally, which will take up storage on the BlackBerry.

Search results are presented in much the same way.

This new user interface to the library will be included in version 1.0.4.

Version 1.0.3 is now available as a general update. To download and install this, just select update from the menu.

1.0.3 Preview 2 has a problem downloading certain album types which caused the album load to stall under certain circumstances. This should now be fixed in Preview 3.

This version also adds the ability to search the library and create playlists from the search results, as is illustrated to the left. You can do this simply by selecting Search from the library viewer menu.

Just put in your search term and click on OK. Tiggit controller will then perform a search, via the current zone player, and return all of the places that the search term appears in artist and album names. Track names are not searched by the zone player.

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From the search results you can choose to play a particular track or album right away, or you can add them to the queue – as you might expect.

Registered users can now download this release of tiggit controller here. To install, use your BlackBerry browser to click on this link for over-the-air installation.

Please note that this is an early release and may have a number of defects. It is being released at this time for early customer trials and feedback. The preview version is only suitable for OS 4.6, and has only been tested on a BlackBerry Bold. This build will not work on OS 4.5 and may not work on other devices. At this time tiggit controller does not work with BlackBerry Storm 2.

Tiggit Controller does not work on Storm 2, and possibly all OS 5.0 devices, because of a defect in the RIM OS. Tiggit Controller is reliant on being able to accept network updates from the Sonos device. This is achieved using a ServerSocket on the BlackBerry and allowing connections from the the SONOS on a known port. Unfortunately SeverSockets don’t appear to work on Storm 2.

I have logged the problem as a defect with Research In Motion, and I am pleased to hear from Gurtej (at RIM) today that he has managed to reproduce the problem. I am also pleased to see that is has been assigned a HIGH priority. I am not sure what this means, other than someone at RIM acknowledges that an important part of the network capabilities of the BlackBerry do not work on the Storm 2.

Once this problem is fixed by RIM, and there is no indication of when this will be, I expect that Tiggit Controller will just work on the Storm 2 platform.

I have just posted an update to version 1.0.3: Many users reported problems opening the library viewer, in particular getting no response from the library menu action.

Preview 2 fixes that problem and  although the library looks much the same once it has loaded, and works the same way, it has some new features.

It still takes a few seconds for the library view to properly populate, but this is now better handled.

The reload function now provides much better feedback to the user, showing the initial connection, and then updating as each block is downloaded.

You should only need to use reload each time you add music to your library. It takes a minute or so to complete the download, but this should not be too long to wait once in a while.

Registered users can now download this release of tiggit controller here. To install, use your BlackBerry browser to click on this link for over-the-air installation.

Please note that this is an early release and may have a number of defects. It is being released at this time for early customer trials and feedback. The preview version is only suitable for OS 4.6, and has only been tested on a BlackBerry Bold. This build will not work on OS 4.5 and may not work on other devices. At this time tiggit controller does not work with BlackBerry Storm 2.

I have just posted the first preview release of version 1.0.3. This release has one important new feature: support for the Library.

This means that you can use tiggit controller to browse the music that is available in the Sonos library, and to select tracks to be played. The library can be organised by Artist or Album, or play list. The screen shots below give you some idea how to navigate the Sonos library.

You can expand by artist, album, imported play list or Sonos playlist. When you have found the track(s) that you are looking for you can add them to the queue either as a single track, or as an album or play list.

When navigating around the library you can use the keyboard to jump to the first track/album/play list that starts with the letter pressed. For example, pressing the K key will make the library viewer jump to the first Album that starts with K. If you expand this album view and move to it’s tracks, pressing K again will jump you to the first track that starts with K. This ‘hot key’ functionality works in much the same way for artists and playlists.

When adding to the queue you can choose to either add the track/album/playlist directly to the queue, or just play right away. In this case the track(s) are added to the end of the queue and the first added track is selected and the zone player is set to play mode.

As this version provides support for play lists, it also allows you to save the current queue as a Sonos play list. Simply select Save queue from the menu, and give the list a name, as illustrated by the screen shots below.

Registered users can now download this release of tiggit controller here. To install, use your BlackBerry browser to click on this link for over-the-air installation.

One thing to note: tiggit controller performs a one-time download of the details of the library, and so when you first open the library view you may be presented with an empty list of albums and artists. In this case select Reload from the menu to cause the library details to be downloaded. This can take a few minutes. Each time you add new tracks to your Sonos library you will need to reload again from this screen. Playlists are updated each time tiggit controller is run.

Please note that this is an early release and may have a number of defects. It is being released at this time for early customer trials and feedback. The preview version is only suitable for OS 4.6, and has only been tested on a BlackBerry Bold. This build will not work on OS 4.5 and may not work on other devices. At this time tiggit controller does not work with BlackBerry Storm 2.

Still to come for the full release of 1.0.3 is

• Library search
• Improved ability to set equalizer settings for linked zones.

Work on library access – the ability to show the music library, and add tracks/albums to the zone player queue – is making good progress. I thought I would post a couple of screen shots that show work in progress. I have realised that this really needs a video to make this come to life, but for now here are some screen shots. These show the library view and the new menu options from the library view.

I have departed from the approach taken by Sonos in this implementation: With the desktop controller Sonos make requests to a zone player each time the controller needs information about the library. From the BlackBerry there is quite a bit of overhead in parsing the zone player results, and so I have chosen to download the library details and store them on the handheld, allowing the user to choose to reload the details. Additionally the handheld builds the Artist view from the Album view, rather than requesting it from the zone player.

I will use a similar approach for the imported playlists, but will use the server to provide search functions, as I feel that the zone player will be faster at searching the library than the BlackBerry.

I am expecting to post a preview version in the next few days that allows at least access to the library, if not play lists and search.

Version 1-0-2 of Tiggit Controller for BlackBerry is now available for download. This version uses the same library to access the Sonos Zone Players as the Nokia controller and has compelete separation of the BlackBerry specific code. This is, of course, not very interesting for BlackBerry users.

Version 1-0-2 also fixes a bug that resulted in only the first 25 tracks in the queue being downloaded.

Existing users can download the latest version by simply selecting update from the menu. The update will be downloaded using the WiFi connection.

Here are some screen shots of the progress I have been making on the Nokia project. As you can see many of the basic screens are in place and are functional. I have decided not to add the queue to the what’s playing screen as the E71 does not have space on the screen for this. Instead there are two buttons to allow users to navigate to the Volume settings and the Queue display.

There are still a number of problems with network access and performance in general of the Nokia device. It is remarkably slower than the BlackBerry. There is also a problem with the Nokia disconnecting from WiFi at every opportunity, requiring rejoining the network for every access.

Incidentally the queue shown above is a Napster play list, so at first glance it would appear to work with Napster.

Release of the nokia version is being held up by two things:

1. My intended target is the E71 and similar smart phones. Naively I assumed that all of the APIs available in the SDK would be available on this device – which they are not. So, having got a long way implementing the user interface in SWT, I have had to start again and implement in pure LCDUI. This is making good progress, but is quite a bit of work.

2. The second problem maybe more difficult. The E71 appears to close down it’s WiFi interface when inactive and so misses status updates from the ZonePlayer. I need to find a way to keep the WiFi interface active. I would also like to limit the irritating network selection dialogues.

Anyhow, here is the progress that I have made so far, in the form of some screen shots from the simulator. As you will see the UI is still quite clunky, but it is getting there. When I can I will also post some pictures of the code on an actual E71

Those that have already contacted me about taking part in initial trials will receive an email when there is something ready to download and trial.