How to AirPlay Music and Podcasts to Your Sonos Speakers with AirSonos [Tutorial]

How to AirPlay Music and Podcasts to Your Sonos Speakers with AirSonos [Tutorial]

February 2, 2016 22:25 EST • Alexandre Vallières-Lagacé • 2 minute read

I really love my Sonos Play:1 and I keep moving from room to room with me when I work in the office, in the garage and outside when I keep an eye on the kids in the pool. But if there is one feature I was missing it is the famous AirPlay.

Being able to AirPlay music, podcast or even YouTube videos to a speaker is the single reason why people are cooled off when I show them my Sonos. Well, after a rocky start last year, there is now a solution and I will help you make it work as simple as possible. It’s called AirSonos and it lives on your Mac!

The General Idea

What we want to accomplish is installing a new Terminal command on your Mac that will launch a tool that will create a bridge from your computer to your Sonos speakers. Nothing is changed on the Sonos itself, only on your Mac. And in no way can this break your Mac or your Sonos. This bridge will allow your Mac to appear as an AirPlay speaker to your iOS devices.

What will happen?

We will install NodeJS and then install the AirSonos command.1

First of all, we need to install NodeJS. Go to this URL and download the stable release, at the time or writing v.5.6.0: https://nodejs.org/en/

Once this is installed you will have the package manager (npm, NodeJS Package Manager) installed with which you can then install AirSonos.

Open the Terminal and run this commands:

sudo npm install airsonos -g
It will ask for your password to run the command with administrator privileges.

airsonos

This will launch AirSonos and you should see something similar to this:

Searching for Sonos devices on network...
Setting up AirSonos for Office {10.0.1.7:1400}

You can now open AirPlay from your iOS device on the same network as the Sonos speaker and you will be able to broadcast your audio to them!

Hopefully, this tutorial did not scare you away! :)

  1. Thanks @jsnell for the push to re-test the procedure and make it much simpler! ↩︎