I make no secret of it, I love Sonos gear and am thoroughly addicted to it. It started out quite innocently with just a single PLAY:1 that was soon joined by it’s twin to make a stereo pair – these live in my bedroom and work as the best alarm clock I’ve ever used. Not long after that a PLAY:3 joined the mix in the living room, and then as it was lonely on it’s own, a second one came along… And, well, you get the idea.

One of the best features of Sonos is it’s integration with 3rd party streaming music services. As well as being able to play from your iTunes music library, either stored directly on your computer, or accessed via a NAS or a home server, you can play from a huge number of streaming radio stations as well as services like Pandora, SoundCloud and Spotify.

I have been listening to the high quality music that the folks over at SomaFM have been broadcasting for more than a decade now – they have expanded the number of stations that they broadcast over the years however the sounds on Groove Salad, Beat Blender and Lush have consistently been in my playlists for a long time.

Sometimes however you want to listen to something more specific and this is where Spotify shines. Whilst you have been able to listen to Spotify streams in Sonos for some time now, the integration has always seemed like a bit of an afterthought. I’m sure that this was partly for technical reasons and partly for legal or political reasons, but whatever the reason, it was never as straightforward as it should have been.

If you wanted to listen to a particular album or stream on Spotify, you first had to go into the Spotify app or web app, find what you wanted to listen to, save it as a Playlist or a Favourite and then go into the Sonos app and locate it from there.

With the latest Sonos update, this has all changed. Version 5.5 brings to the table the ability to start a new Sonos station from the song that’s currently playing, or search for your favourite artist – all within the Sonos app. They also deliver a Daily Soundtrack with a selection of playlists based on the current time of day (it’s 7am and I’m presented with a Rise and Shine! selection). You can also browse Genres and Moods, New Releases and Charts – pretty much the entire experience you get when using the Spotify app itself.

All in all, this is a highly recommended update if you’ve got Sonos and Spotify, and it’s free – so get onto it!