I have checked with Sonos, and they have confirmed that you cannot ask Alexa to play tracks from your own library.
Further, they have no plans to support this.
As much as I love my existing Sonus setup, and as much as I want to try Alexa out, I do NOT want to sign up to a music service when I have a large quantity of my favourite music already in my home Sonus library.
I have no idea of the technical challenges involved with this. Given your voice command is uploaded and parsed somewhere else, it may be too difficult to send back the results to the sonos controller to access the local library.
None the less, I wanted to start a conversation to see if I am alone, or if this is something a lot of people want.
Regards, Ian
Playing from local music library not possible using Alexa/voice control
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Userlevel 7
+22
Ok. Your entitled to your opinion.
Userlevel 1
I do. And I complain to Sonos for leading me and many other Sonos buyers to think their product would play “our music”. It’s a misleading advertisement that they refuse to amend.
Userlevel 7
+22
Complain to Amazon. Amazon controls the voice operations and they have not developed facilities to access local library. An older answer Amazon had in place would have been upload your local library to their cloud player for access. However they discontinued their cloud storage option even further backing away from local music access. Amazon makes these decisions as they run the voice aspect - not sonos. Complain to them,
Semantics. 'Their music' is specific to 'them.' While I agree it is misleading to those of us that have and rely on local libraries, for all others that are streamers it is dead on. And supposedly we're a 7% minority.
Userlevel 1
A month ago, more or less, I pointed out in several posts on this forum, and on twitter to Sonos support, that their advert is actually misleading: it leads buyers (especially previous Sonos users) to believe that they can control "Their Music", that is, in my case, the music I own in my collection. If confirmed, the fact that they aren't planning to support this feature in the future is a disgrace, in my opinion.
If it is made up, then Sonos is on the hook for it, because it is they who stated 93% of Sonos usage is via streaming, the rest local libraries.
10% sounds made up to me, I'd guess that it's the other way around and 90% still listen to high quality audio files stored locally. I know I do and have no interest in streaming, so for me it's a big miss except I have no interest in 'talking' to my Sonos in any case and having it mis-interpret everything!
That 10% is probably not going to get any smaller though since we are down to folks who have music in their collections that is not offered on any streaming service and the option to upload personal tracks to cloud services looks to be something those services want to get away from. In other words there will always be a demand for some local playback and, like what happened with vinyl, that demand will likely resurge somewhat down the road.
Maybe 10% of Sonos customers still using the outmoded idea of ripping CDs to a NAS, or the awful iTunes. Sonos’ focus needs to be on the vast majority of their customers, who stream from a cloud provider.
Most people were aware that the Alexa integration does not currently support local library playback but I think the "no plans to do so" is new information. If you are willing to run a PC on your network it may be possible to do what you want using a 3rd party Alexa skill. It might be worth doing a search on Sonos in the Alexa App skills section to see what options there are.
Userlevel 7
+20
Hi Ian
Your not the first to mention this....
The issue isn't so much a Sonos problem but an AI restriction - neither Amazon Alexa nor Google Assistant support voice control of local music libraries. This is mainly because Amazon or Google would need to build an Index of what music is contained in your library and store this in the 'Cloud' - for everyone that wants this feature. This situation will get worse soon as Amazon are removing the ability to upload your music library to the Amazon Cloud in early 2018.
Your not the first to mention this....
The issue isn't so much a Sonos problem but an AI restriction - neither Amazon Alexa nor Google Assistant support voice control of local music libraries. This is mainly because Amazon or Google would need to build an Index of what music is contained in your library and store this in the 'Cloud' - for everyone that wants this feature. This situation will get worse soon as Amazon are removing the ability to upload your music library to the Amazon Cloud in early 2018.
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