Sonos, Itunes, Spotify: Oh My!

So my house was just redone and all the speakers and Alexa devices removed. I use to have my computer connected to a set of speakers in my office and my musical life was simple and good. I could listen to music with iTunes on my iPhone. Play music with iTunes from my computer through the speakers. Or tell Alexa what I wanted to listen to and she played.

Today there's Sonos speakers all over the place. The Alexa speakers are gone. My kids have created a Spotify account for me and left for college telling me I'm going to love it. So this morning, I sat down with my computer and iPhone and tried to figure out the relationship between by three devices (iPhone, iMac, and Windows computer), these Sonos speakers, and the software for Spotify, iTunes, and Sonon.

I'm sixty years old. Is this my Waterloo? I'll tell you one thing, the F*ing World Wide Web is NOT serving up any charts or explanations that help me understand it so here I am trying to puzzle it out.

Starting with the Sonos speakers, they seem to be wifi enabled and on our home wifi network.  There' s an indeterminate number of them and someone has given them names which are sometimes helpful such as office and kitchen.

Current puzzle: I'm listening to the Dixie Chicks played on iTunes on my computer. It's playing through the feeble speaker built into my windows PC. How do I get it to play through the Sonos speaker? Do I go into iTunes and get it talk to the Sonos? Do I go into Sonos and get it to talk iTunes?  It's interesting none of these programs seem to live in a browser, they all seem to be apps that have to be installed on the computer. I wonder why?

Stay tuned.....

And I quote from the Sonos community forum:

Q: When playing music in iTunes, the music comes out my computer speakers. How do I change it where iTunes on my computer will play on my Sonos speaker?

A1 You don't really "change it". On your sonos under settings...music library settings...you point sonos to the location of your iTunes music. Sonos then goes to that folder on your computer and indexes all the music and makes it available then to you on Sonos.

Okay thanks. I was controlling my music from iTunes on my computer and whatever song I choose, I wanted to play on my Sonos speaker. So it doesn't work this, it only works from Sonos to iTunes and not iTunes to Sonos?

Yes Sonos has to go out and fetch the song from iTunes (it actually makes it more robust and better quality as it fetches the song file directly and plays it directly on device vs. it streaming from a source).

Correct. What you're doing with Sonos is telling the system where your iTunes library exists. You then use the controller app to tell the "player" on the speaker where to go and get the music from. 

At that point, you're not really using iTunes at all, you're using what appears to be a Sonos player app.

This sounded good so I went into Sonos, pointed it towards my music folder and was terribly optimistic when the music, after a few minutes, showed up in the Sonos app. So I picked play on some Paul Simon music but am not stuck with this message.

Sonos unable to play iTunes music from windows computer

So, I'm still stuck.....

First Principle: Forget iTunes for playing purposes. Going forward, point Sonos towards the music library and play with the Sonos player.

Great, onto questions about Spotify and Alexa and how they relate to Sonos. Also, audio and video input.   Can the Sonos speakers be a front end on Alexa? Do I have to use my phone or computer as an Alexa front end?  My computer use to rely on my speaker/microphone set up for audio input. Now that the computer is essentially in a drawer and all the audio attachments are gone, how do I video conference on my computer?  How do I run telephone conversations across my computer? What a pain in the neck?