Sonos finally supports a Microsoft music subscription service, officially.

Many moons ago, you could play back rights managed Zune music files, but it wasn’t exactly a consumer friendly option. You needed to install the Zune software on a Windows, share your music library through Windows Media Player, and then your Sonos units could play back any of the rights protected WMA files. Not exactly integrated, and not exactly end user friendly but it worked. One day, however, a Sonos system update removed this capability. This didn’t completely leave all users in the dark, if you had a subscription that included the 10 free downloads per month, those MP3 files worked fine. However, as the plans morphed, new subscribers weren’t given this option.

Fast forward to the Windows 10 launch activities, and we now have the rebranded Zune/Xbox Music subscription reclaiming the Groove brand that Microsoft has owned for quite a while, and we have subscription integration into the Sonos client. Setting it up in it’s current state is a little different, so I’ll include those steps.

In Add Music Services you need to choose Sonos Labs, rather than Groove being listed by default.

 

 

 

 

From there just look for the Groove logo, and click on it, and you will be provided with the necessary steps to link your Sonos to your Groove subscription. I had already completed this, so you don’t see all the screens, but you will need to sign in to the Groove music site to verify.

Now we have Groove available as a music source.

You can see that I can browse my own collection (including music in my OneDrive music folder, along with Playlists, New Releases, Top songs and Genre Radios.

In my Collection I can search, or browse by Artists, Albums or Songs.

 

I’ve selected New Releases.

 

And now I can filter by Genre.

 

 

Under Tops you can filter by Songs, Artists or Albums

 

Here you can see the Artists, and again I can filter based on Genre.

 

 

In this example I’ve used Classical as the filter.

This is just a quick look, I’ll post more once I’ve had more time to play around, but I’m happy this has finally happened. A big thank you to Sonos and Microsoft!