Sonos Control

A minimal, fast Sonos controller for macOS — lives in the menu bar, opens instantly, plays/pauses your zone in a single click.

Built to replace the official Sonos desktop app for the 99% case (play, pause, volume, pick a station) without the slow startup or requiring Rosetta.

There are many Sonos apps out there. This is mine.

Install

Download the latest release from GitHub Releases, unzip, and drag Sonos Control.app to /Applications. macOS will prompt for Local Network access the first time you launch — grant it so the app can discover your Sonos speakers.

Auto-updates are handled via Sparkle.

Features

• Menu bar app, no dock icon. Opens in ~50ms, gets out of your way.
• Play/pause, transport, volume. Single tap. Volume slider is live as you drag.
• Zone control. Pick a primary zone; toggle any other zones to join or leave its group with a switch.
• Now playing. Song / artist / album-or-station. Click the album art for full-resolution view + "Open in Apple Music."
• Recently played. Last 10 songs the system played, even when the menu was closed. Click any to find it in Apple Music.
• Favorites. Pick from your Sonos favorites (radio stations, playlists, albums).
• Global hotkey. Default F8 for play/pause from anywhere. Fully customizable.
• In-menu shortcuts. ⌘P play/pause, ⌘= / ⌘− volume. All customizable.
• Offline-aware. Icon greys out when off the home network.
• Auto-updates via Sparkle.

How it works

Talks directly to your Sonos players over the local LAN using their built-in UPnP/SOAP API on port 1400. No Sonos account login required, no cloud round-trip — every command is a single HTTP request to the speaker, typically 20–50ms.

Players are discovered via SSDP (M-SEARCH to 239.255.255.250:1900) on launch. After discovery the app caches IPs and polls now-playing every 10s in the background, 3s while the menu is open.

Notes

Sandbox is off

SSDP multicast requires unsandboxed networking, so ENABLE_APP_SANDBOX = NO. The Sparkle framework is signed with hardened runtime. The app has no filesystem access beyond ~/Library/Application Support/SonosControl/ (logs).

Limitations

• No multi-room source switching (each group plays one source — the primary).
• No queue management UI (favorites/streams replace the queue when picked).
• No search.
• No iOS/iPad version.

By design — this is a 99%-case controller, not a full Sonos app.

Building locally

Requirements: Xcode 16.2+ (macOS 14+).

Open SonosControl.xcodeproj in Xcode and ⌘R to run a Debug build, or:

# Build in Release, sign with your Developer ID, install to /Applications.
./Scripts/local-install-app.sh

Requires a Developer ID Application certificate in your login keychain.

Forking

If you want to publish your own builds (with your own update feed), replace these before building:

File	Setting	What to change
SonosControl.xcodeproj/project.pbxproj	PRODUCT_BUNDLE_IDENTIFIER	com.yourname.SonosControl
SonosControl.xcodeproj/project.pbxproj	DEVELOPMENT_TEAM	your Apple Developer team ID
SonosControl/Info.plist	SUFeedURL	URL of your appcast.xml
SonosControl/Info.plist	SUPublicEDKey	public key from generate_keys (Sparkle)
Scripts/sparkle-config.sh	various	your GitHub repo & Pages URLs

If you don't plan to publish updates, blank out SUPublicEDKey and Sparkle will just sit quietly.

Releasing

# Build, sign, notarize, staple → dist/SonosControl-<version>-macos.zip
./Scripts/local-release-build.sh 1.0.1

# Or do the whole release flow: build → GH release → appcast → push
./Scripts/publish-release.sh 1.0.1

Requires:

• Developer ID Application certificate
• xcrun notarytool store-credentials sonoscontrol-notary (one-time setup)
• gh CLI authenticated
• Sparkle key pair generated via generate_keys and stored in your keychain under the SPARKLE_KEY_ACCOUNT from sparkle-config.sh
• GitHub Pages enabled on your fork, serving from main/docs

License

MIT. See LICENSE.