Release notes

Version 0.8

New Features

  • Re-added support for Python 2.6 (#154)
  • Added SoCo.get_sonos_playlists() (#114)
  • Added methods for working with speaker topology
  • A new soco.plugins.spotify.Spotify plugin allows querying and playing the Spotify music catalogue (#119):

    from soco.plugins.spotify import Spotify
    from soco.plugins.spotify import SpotifyTrack
    # create a new plugin, pass the soco instance to it
    myplugin = Spotify(device)
    print 'index: ' + str(myplugin.add_track_to_queue(SpotifyTrack('
        spotify:track:20DfkHC5grnKNJCzZQB6KC')))
    print 'index: ' + str(myplugin.add_album_to_queue(SpotifyAlbum('
        spotify:album:6a50SaJpvdWDp13t0wUcPU')))
    
  • A soco.data_structures.URI item can be passed to add_to_queue which allows playing music from arbitrary URIs (#147)

    import soco
    from soco.data_structures import URI
    
    soc = soco.SoCo('...ip_address...')
    uri = URI('http://www.noiseaddicts.com/samples/17.mp3')
    soc.add_to_queue(uri)
    
  • A new include_invisible parameter to soco.discover() can be used to retrieve invisible speakers or bridges (#146)

  • A new timeout parameter to soco.discover(). If no zones are found within timeout seconds None is returned. (#146)

  • Network requests can be cached for better performance (#131).

  • It is now possible to subscribe to events of a service using its subscribe method, which returns a Subscription object. To unsubscribe, call the unsubscribe method on the returned object. (#121, #130)

  • Support for reading and setting crossfade (#165)

Improvements

  • Performance improvements for speaker discovery (#146)
  • Various improvements to the Wimp plugin (#140).
  • Test coverage tracking using coveralls.io (#163)

Backwards Compatability

Version 0.7

New Features

  • All information about queue and music library items, like e.g. the title and album of a track, are now included in data structure classes instead of dictionaries (the classes are available in the The data_structures sub module sub-module ). This advantages of this approach are:

    • The type of the item is identifiable by its class name
    • They have useful __str__ representations and an __equals__ method
    • Information is available as named attributes
    • They have the ability to produce their own UPnP meta-data (which is used by the add_to_queue method).

    See the Backwards Compatibility notice below.

  • A webservice analyzer has been added in dev_tools/analyse_ws.py (#46).

  • The commandline interface has been split into a separate project socos. It provides an command line interface on top of the SoCo library, and allows users to control their Sonos speakers from scripts and from an interactive shell.

  • Python 3.2 and later is now supported in addition to 2.7.

  • A simple version of the first plugin for the Wimp service has been added (#93).

  • The new soco.discover() method provides an easier interface for discovering speakers in your network. SonosDiscovery has been deprecated in favour of it (see Backwards Compatability below).

  • SoCo instances are now singletons per IP address. For any given IP address, there is only one SoCo instance.

  • The code for generating the XML to be sent to Sonos devices has been completely rewritten, and it is now much easier to add new functionality. All services exposed by Sonos zones are now available if you need them (#48).

Backwards Compatability

Warning

Please read the section below carefully when upgrading to SoCo 0.7.

Data Structures

The move to using data structure classes for music item information instead of dictionaries introduces some backwards incompatible changes in the library (see #83). The get_queue and get_library_information functions (and all methods derived from the latter) are affected. In the data structure classes, information like e.g. the title is now available as named attributes. This means that by the update to 0.7 it will also be necessary to update your code like e.g:

# Version < 0.7
for item in soco.get_queue():
    print item['title']
# Version >=0.7
for item in soco.get_queue():
    print item.title

SonosDiscovery

The SonosDiscovery class has been deprecated (see #80 and #75).

Instead of the following

>>> import soco
>>> d = soco.SonosDiscovery()
>>> ips = d.get_speaker_ips()
>>> for i in ips:
...        s = soco.SoCo(i)
...        print s.player_name

you should now write

>>> import soco
>>> for s in soco.discover():
...        print s.player_name

Properties

A number of methods have been replaced with properties, to simplify use (see #62 )

For example, use

soco.volume = 30
soco.volume -=3
soco.status_light = True

instead of

soco.volume(30)
soco.volume(soco.volume()-3)
soco.status_light("On")

Version 0.6

New features

  • Music library information: Several methods has been added to get information about the music library. It is now possible to get e.g. lists of tracks, albums and artists.
  • Raise exceptions on errors: Several SoCo specific exceptions has been added. These exceptions are now raised e.g. when SoCo encounters communications errors instead of returning an error codes. This introduces a backwards incompatible change in SoCo that all users should be aware of.

For SoCo developers

  • Added plugin framework: A plugin framework has been added to SoCo. The primary purpose of this framework is to provide a natural partition of the code, in which code that is specific to the individual music services is separated out into its own class as a plugin. Read more about the plugin framework in the docs.
  • Added unit testing framework: A unit testing framework has been added to SoCo and unit tests has been written for 30% of the methods in the SoCo class. Please consider supplementing any new functionality with the appropriate unit tests and fell free to write unit tests for any of the methods that are still missing.

Coming next

  • Data structure change: For the next version of SoCo it is planned to change the way SoCo handles data. It is planned to use classes for all the data structures, both internally and for in- and output. This will introduce a backwards incompatible change and therefore users of SoCo should be aware that extra work will be needed upon upgrading from version 0.6 to 0.7. The data structure changes will be described in more detail in the release notes for version 0.7.