We are trying to come up with a "go to" piece that will give us the best experience and control for accessing services like Pandora, Spotify, internet radio, etc....C4 has had Rhapsody built in for a long time and it works great. And it looks like they will also have a built in driver for Tune-In internet radio in the next release. Their built-in "My Music" driver works pretty good for accessing local music on the network. But if the client changes the location or folder name of the shares, it requires us to change it in the software to "fix" it. Not sure is Composer Media Edition allows users to redirect the C4 to new locations of stored music files or not.

I think we have 3 choices so far. We have racked up a couple of Grace Digital Tuners for a couple of projects and have been testing them in the shop. Not bad. Not good, but not bad. It supports Pandora, SiriusXM, iheartradio, and a few other things that no one will ever use. It has an FM tuner in it but EV did not put that in the driver so you cannot control it (why?). And to get it to see your local files, you have to use UPNP of some kind and when I asked them how to make it work, they told me not to use it as it is a PITA. No problem....C4 can do it on its own.

My biggest complaint with the Grace is there is no web gui for setup. You have to manually do stuff from the front panel....granted there is not much to set up, but still.

I brought in my SONOS Connect and threw it on the same system with a trial of the EV driver. So far it works as well or better than the Grace. You get more services available to you, although the driver only gives you direct access to several of them. You can call up your SONOS favorites easy enough though which can be whatever you want them to be...Pandora, MOG, Spotify, Amazon, etc.....

The local playback is stellar as you would expect. Basically it does whatever SONOS will do...but within the confines of the C4 GUI, which is less than stellar IMHO.

The plus is that you can configure the SONOS through their app which gives you all the control you need in an easy to find place...phone, tablet, computer, etc. You make changes to you services, favorites, etc...and they automatically get updated on the C4 side.

Choosing between the Grace and SONOS is a no brainer for me. SONOS does way more than the Grace. The slightly higher cost is not nearly enough to use the Grace.

The one I have not tried yet, and would love to, is the Autonomic server. I do not think it has as many service options as the SONOS. But it has multiple outputs and internal storage for local files. Those 2 things make it attractive from an installers perspective. But I do not see how it will give any better user experience than the SONOS. The C4 gui for all these devices is virtually identical. List navigation (think iPod style), and no real graphics except on the now playing screen.

Can other C4 integrators chime in? Has anyone done anything with the SONOS rumored new ability to allow a URL to call up its app and provide a return back to the control system app? Supposedly they were going to make this available, but I have no idea how it works or how one would make it work in Composer.

I use SONOS at home so maybe my view is biased, but I honestly think that there is not a better solution for streaming/local music playback out there. For sheer user experience, ease of setup, ease of use, and ease of installation, nothing beats it. And reliability and support are top notch.