Bluetooth to the rescue!įortunately, the Echo has built in Bluetooth, and as I had an old Bluetooth audio receiver lying around I have now paired my Echo Dot to my iSkin Cerulean Bluetooth Receiver which is connected to the line in on my Mac Mini. Nicecast costs $59, but the free trial version allows you to broadcast for up to 1 hour, perfect for testing out the app.Īs my Mac Mini is on 24×7 anyway I don’t have any issues in leaving my Echo dot connected to it, however as my Mac Mini is in the upstairs office, and not in the room where I have my Sonos speakers, it wasn’t ideal. You’ll then be able to ask Alexa to play anything from any music service you have setup on your echo, in my case that’s Spotify. Then you just need to click the ‘Start Broadcast’ button in the Nicecast app, select the radio station you just created within the sonos app which will be listed in the Radio by Tunein/My Radio Stations and click play! The Nicecast app makes this a doddle, it gives you a streaming url that you just enter into the ‘Radio Station’ you create in the Sonos controller app. You then just need to select that as an input source in the Nicecast app, the next step is to broadcast that input! With Nicecast installed on my Mac it was just a case of connecting the line out port of the Echo Dot to the line input port on the Mac mini using 3.5mm cable. This fantastically simple app allows you to create an audio stream, either public or in my case over my own network, from virtually any source that you can play on your Mac! It was then that I discovered Nicecast by Rogue Amoeba I struggled to get it to work, but I knew that the idea was in theory possible, I even created a post on the Sonos Community forum to see if anyone could help out with some advice or suggestions to get it working, but had no response □ Nicecast I initially tried using VLC on my Mac Mini to capture/stream an audio source and create a live stream that I could broadcast over my local network, and use that stream address within the Sonos controller app. I spent some time thinking about how I could use my current setup and add the voice control functionality, I spent some time looking at audio streaming solutions as the Sonos app allows you to add radio stations for playback through your Sonos Speakers. Having purchased a pair of excellent Sonos Play 1 Speakers over a year ago, and then buying an Amazon Echo Dot on Prime Day I was patiently waiting for the long awaited Sonos & Amazon Alexa integration that was announced by Sonos in 2016.
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