SoCo 0.7 release notes

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 Music Library Data Structures 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")