How to switch your Sonos on and off at arbitrary times
by Volker Weber
Sonos has an alarm, which can play your favorite music to wake you up in the morning. It has all kinds of settings to repeat the alarm on certain weekdays, you can play in connected zones, it lets you preselect the volume. And you can set the alarm time from 15 minutes to 2 hours, or indefinite. But you can't turn it on in the morning and turn it off in the evening. Two hours is the maximum interval.
Use case: you have a store that opens at eight and closes at midnight. Here is a clever workaround:
- Set an alarm for 8:00 and set the duration to "No limit".
- Set a second alarm for midnight. Select the Sonos chime and set the volume to zero.
The first alarm switches the music on. There is no "off" event. The second alarm switches it on again at midnight. It does not care that it's already on. And then it switches it off.
You can also use multiple alarms for different volumes or different playlists.
Comments
There is a small trade off to this solution. At a quarter to midnight the volume will decrease to silence and the smooth transition to the second alarm volume will occur. Had this happen for me when i was already listening when the alert startet. But in the mentioned use case above probably no one will notice.
And maybe in the current Sonos firmware version this will not happen.
Dirk, I slightly changed the instructions.
Nice, how fast the community comes out with suitable workarounds.
