Sonos Chime for Crestron
Turn any Sonos speaker into the doorbell, the alarm, and the announcement system.
A Crestron Home system knows when the doorbell is pressed, when the alarm arms, when the gate opens and when the school run should start. The Sonos speakers the customer already owns are, at that moment, doing nothing. This driver connects the two.
No extra hardware. No speaker wire. No chime module in the rack.
What it does
Ten configurable chimes, each playing on whichever Sonos speakers you choose. Fire them from any Crestron Home scene, schedule or event:
| Command | Range | What it does |
|---|---|---|
TriggerChime | 1 – 10 | Plays that chime on its speakers |
StopChime | 1 – 10 | Stops a repeating chime |
ChimeLevel | 1 – 100 | Sets the house default volume |
A chime can repeat — every 5 seconds, ten times, or until someone stops it. An intruder alert that politely stops on its own is not an intruder alert.
Each configured chime also appears on the driver's tile in the Crestron Home app, with a Play button.
Your own chimes, and your own words
The catalogue is not the limit.
- Upload two chimes of your own. Any MP3, up to 10 seconds. Your customer's own doorbell sound, their business's audio branding, the noise their last system made and they miss.
- Have the speaker say something. Type "Someone is at the front door", pick a voice, and that is the chime. No extra hardware, no subscription, and no per-press cost — the announcement is recorded once when you set it up, and after that it is simply an audio file like any other.
Both are included with the driver licence. See Custom chimes and announcements.
New improved configuration app in browser on local network
Chimes are configured in a browser app served from the processor, not through the driver's settings pages.
- Search the catalogue instead of scrolling a list of filenames.
- Listen to any chime in your browser — instantly, and silently, without waking the house. This is how you audition thirty chimes in a minute.
- Play it on a real speaker to hear it where it will actually land, at the volume it will really play, before you commit.
- Pick the speakers per chime. Speakers that cannot play chimes are shown greyed out with the reason, rather than quietly missing from the list.
What you need
- A Sonos account, with the speakers already set up in the Sonos app.
- Speakers that support Sonos audio clips. Most modern Sonos speakers do; some older ones do not, and the setup app tells you which.
- Internet access and DNS on the processor. The driver talks to the Sonos cloud, and Sonos streams the chime from a public URL — a processor on an isolated network cannot play a chime.
- A licence — a 30-day trial and full keys are available from the LCD store.
Upgrading from the previous Sonos Chime driver
This is a new driver on the Crestron Home entity model, and it is not an in-place upgrade. The site must be set up again: re-enter the licence key, reconnect the Sonos account, and rebuild the chimes in the new setup app.
Two things to know:
- Your existing licence key still works. The driver keeps the same product SKU.
- Text-to-speech is still here — and it is now included with the licence rather than being a separate subscription. Speech chimes have to be typed in again in the new setup app, but nothing is lost. See Custom chimes and announcements.