Three open source Sonos projects: efficient embedded development in Rust | Hacker News Reader

Three open source Sonos projects: efficient embedded development in Rust

tech-blog.sonos.com

135 pointslukastyrychtr31 comments

Tract looks neat, and I agree that making inference with rich signal support would be a killer app.

I'd love if they did this with pytorch. Tensorflow is quickly falling out of favor.

Deploying models in Rust makes a lot of sense. It's a little rough around the edges, though. (I use Rust bindings to libtorch for https://vo.codes )

Sonos has done some scummy things in the past (bricking units to prevent resale or refurbishment, deactivating old hardware, etc), but they operate in a very hard business sector against giants with monopolistic loss leaders, and this is a really cool open source release. I'm not aiming to buy more Sonos equipment, but I like them a little more now.

Tract supports ONNX models, which you can export from pytorch. See nnsplit[0] as an example for a project that trains with pytorch and serves the model via tract-onnx.

[0]: https://github.com/bminixhofer/nnsplit

Tract looks incredible, I am surprised that it can support Wavenet on the Raspberry Pi Zero.

We were unable to get Tract to work at $job but there's another project, I think called onnxruntime-rs that we did get working with our models.

You can also export them from LightGBM and XGBoost (see sklearn-onnx) for forests and tract will handle them! // well, almost... I need to finally find some time and finish my tract PR :)

I believe it also supports what it calls "pulse" models converted/imported from Kaldi for low-latency ASR/keyword spotting (though this may have changed, I haven't checked in a while).

If they were to give me access to the Linux system running on my Sonos devices, I'd be rather more inclined to buy the idea that Sonos is a supporter of open source. There are many things in need of fixing there, and their customers would be most inclined to help, but no such luck.

Given their history of pissing off customers and their zero respect for privacy, my answer is thanks but no thanks.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/sonos-accept-new-privacy-polic...

https://www.vice.com/en/article/3a8dpn/sonos-makes-it-clear-...

I'm thrilled to see all the mentions of SONOS networking in the article. These devices form their own mesh network, right? Also SONOS devices phone home, a lot. I'd love to see all that mapped and, ultimately, open code committed by the community at large.

I'm still not sure what problem these open source devices really solve. The sorts of people that would be interested can probably already just ssh into their desktop/raspberry pi and don't need anything more interesting than that.

Let’s not forget these projects come from the same company that

1) had a so-called recycle mode in their devices that bricked them with no undo option,

2) lately requires you to create an account on their site just so your networked speakers may work at all.

You know how many internet accounts I need to take a raspberry pi, a USB DAC, hook those to a fine pair of Edifier speakers and run shairport-sync?

NONE AT ALL.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Heh, the thoughts are similar but not that similar.

https://github.com/mikebrady/shairport-sync

It actually does implement multi-room synchronized audio. This was the one thing keeping me from running an OSS audio solution using RPis. I like that it runs AirPlay, so it can "just work" using existing devices, and not a crazy uncle solution.

And they acquired and killed Snips.

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