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Hi all,

this is a somewhat advanced setup I suspect. For using Sonos with a local music provider exposing the subsonic protocol, the Open Source project bonob provides an integration with Sonos (https://github.com/simojenki/bonob).

Note the word “local” - this is happening on the local network entirely and works great with one minor exception.

The “old” search is fine. However, https://docs.sonos.com/docs/add-search#all-search-category requires the media provider/content service to be exposed to the Internet (so that it is reachable from Sonos’s cloud). For a local service, that’s obviously a non-starter.

(I’m a bit confused why a search has to be routed through Sonos’s servers in the first place (the client obviously already has access to the content providers, otherwise it couldn’t play the media?) and would be curious about the rationale; why does Sonos need to see all my searches? I have data privacy questions. But let’s not go there for now 🙂 )

More importantly, I wonder if the “old” search will stick around? Or if there’s a way of implementing the new API so that it can be provided entirely local?

Old-old search has to stick around as long as the Desktop controllers exist, as it is all they support.

Old-search is mobile only (it merges all the services results together, I find it super annoying), it has to stay around while there are services that don’t support new-search, which I am hoping is forever.

I see no way for new-search to support anything local (be it Local Library or Bonob) while it continues to use the cloud searching, for the reasons described above. I share the OP’s confusion as to why new-search even uses this method.


Just to add this to this thread as well in case anyone else comes looking - of course they removed the v1 search and are now cloud only in their most recent update.