Tech

10 tips for getting the most out of your Sonos speakers

Tim Stenovec

2016-01-18T14:26:00Z

Sonos makes a line of speakers that sound great.

But the WiFi connected speakers do so much more than just play music or podcasts.

To get the most out of your Sonos products, you'll need to have a good understanding of the mobile app, which you can use to control the speaker.

Shuffle a playlist, repeat a song, or repeat a playlist.

You can set a song or playlist to repeat or set your playlist to shuffle in your queue, which you get to by tapping the three lines in the bottom of your controller when it's on the "Now Playing" screen. You'll find the shuffle and repeat buttons in the top right corner of the screen. A "1" inside the button indicates that the song will repeat while an empty button indicates the playlist will repeat.

Set an alarm and wake up to whatever you want.

Tap the three lines in the top left of your Sonos app to get to the Settings, and then tap "Alarms," and "New Alarm."

You can also customize each alarm.

You can choose if you want to wake up to the radio, music from a playlist, or even Sonos chimes, as well as adjust the volume of the alarm and even which speaker it comes from.

Set a sleep timer so your music turns off after you fall asleep.

Tap the three dots on the Now Playing screen —the Info and Options button — and then tap Sleep Timer.

Then, choose the length of the timer.

Use TuneIn to listen to different radio stations.

TuneIn has a huge selection of radio stations that you can listen to for free. I like to keep up with what's going on in places I used to live, so I use it to listen NPR stations in Colorado and California.

You can get to TuneIn using the Main Menu and then browse the more than 100,000 stations that are available.

Search for a specific radio station using the call signs.

Tap the magnifying glass in the top right corner of the app to search for a radio station by call sign.

Add a radio station to "My Radio Stations" on TuneIn to listen to it anytime.

Find the station you want to add by searching for it using the magnifying glass in the top right corner of the app. Be sure to scroll right at the top of the app and search under "stations."

Tap on the station you want to add, tap "more," and tap "add to my radio stations."

Use Trueplay to make your speakers sound better.

Trueplay, which Sonos introduced last year, is a tool in the app that customizes your speakers for wherever they're placed in your home.

It works really well! So well, in fact, that a Sonos speaker still sounded great when an editor at Sound & Vision stuffed it inside a toy bear. "Trueplay is more than an awesomely amazing technology," Darryl Wilkinson, the editor at large for Sound & Vision, wrote after the stuffed bear experiment. "It’s magical — goosebumpingly magical."

To use Trueplay, go to "Settings" and tap "Room Settings."

Speakers that need to be tuned will have a red dot next to their label.

Then, follow the instructions — there's a helpful video — to tune your speaker.

If you have a Playbar, use Night Sound and Speech Enhancement.

Night Sound lowers the volume of loud sounds but enhances quiet sounds, so you can watch action movies and keep your neighbors or anyone else in your house who's asleep happy.

Speech Enhancement makes it easier to hear the dialogue in movies and TV shows.

Turn on Night Sound by tapping the moon icon on the controller.

And tap the dialogue box to turn Speech Enhancement on and off.

Use Crossfade to blend songs together as one ends and the other begins.

Crossfade starts one song before your other song is finished, blending them together so there's never a pause in your music.

To turn on Crossfade, tap "Info & Options" on the controller and turn on Crossfade.