Choragus is a free, open-source Sonos controller for macOS that lets you browse, queue, and play your Sonos system directly from the menu bar — no browser tab, no phone required.
What is Choragus?
Choragus is a lightweight native Mac application that puts full Sonos playback control in your menu bar. Built by Scott Waters and hosted on GitHub, it connects to Sonos speakers on your local network and gives you direct access to your rooms, queues, and playback state without ever touching the official Sonos app.
If you've spent any time with Sonos's own Mac software you'll know the frustration: it's an Electron wrapper that hogs memory, loads slowly, and feels like a web app stapled to your desktop. Choragus takes the opposite philosophy — small, focused, and genuinely native-feeling.
What does Choragus do best?
Choragus excels at staying out of your way while keeping your Sonos speakers within arm's reach. The menu-bar paradigm is the right one here — music control is a support task, not a full-screen experience.
- Room management: switch between individual Sonos zones or grouped rooms without hunting through nested settings.
- Queue browsing: scroll the current queue, jump to any track, and see what's coming up next at a glance.
- Playback controls: play, pause, skip, and adjust volume per room or across a group — all from the same compact popover.
- Now-playing clarity: artist, track, and album art surface immediately so you always know what's filling the room.
The app communicates with Sonos over your LAN using the same local-discovery protocol the official apps use, so response times feel snappy even when your internet is slow or down entirely.
Is Choragus free?
Yes — Choragus is completely free to download and use. The source code is publicly available on GitHub under an open-source licence, which means you can inspect it, build from source yourself, or contribute fixes. There are no paid tiers, no in-app purchases, and no subscription nag screens.
Because it's a community-maintained project rather than a commercial product, updates arrive on an irregular cadence. That's the honest trade-off: free and transparent, but dependent on volunteer effort. At the time of writing it handles day-to-day Sonos tasks reliably on modern macOS.
Who should use Choragus?
Choragus is the right tool for the Mac power-user who already has Sonos speakers and resents switching apps — or switching to their phone — just to skip a track. If you live in the menu bar (Bartender, iStat Menus, Klokki all live up there for me), adding Choragus is zero friction.
It's also a strong pick if you're privacy-conscious: local-network control with open source code means you can verify exactly what the app is doing. No telemetry, no cloud dependency for basic playback, no surprise outbound connections.
If you need deep Sonos features — alarm management, TruePlay tuning, complex multi-room grouping wizards — stay with the official app for those tasks and let Choragus handle the 95% of interactions that are just "play" and "next." The two coexist on the same machine without conflict.
What are the best Choragus alternatives?
The most direct alternative is the official Sonos macOS app, which covers every feature but carries a noticeably heavier footprint. Capo and Scrobbles solve adjacent problems (local audio and Last.fm scrobbling respectively) but aren't Sonos controllers. For menu-bar audio control of a different sort, NepTunes hooks into Apple Music and Spotify but ignores Sonos entirely.
If your household has moved toward AirPlay 2 speakers, AirBuddy covers device-switching more broadly but doesn't speak the Sonos protocol. For now, Choragus has this niche — a genuinely native, zero-cost, menu-bar Sonos controller on Mac — largely to itself.
How does Choragus compare to the official Sonos app?
The official Sonos app wins on feature breadth: setup, EQ, alarms, services, and system updates all live there. Choragus wins on everything else. It launches in under a second, consumes a fraction of the RAM, and never steals focus. I've had the official app miss room-discovery events that Choragus caught immediately — likely because Choragus stays resident and listening rather than rediscovering on every launch.
Think of them as complementary: use the official app when you're configuring the system, and Choragus every other time you touch your music.
