Answered

Playing Local Music Library on Sonos through Alexa

  • 4 October 2017
  • 87 replies
  • 24756 views


Show first post
This topic has been closed for further comments. You can use the search bar to find a similar topic, or create a new one by clicking Create Topic at the top of the page.

87 replies

Userlevel 4
Badge +3
I'd go as far as to say totally misleading. I don't have not want to sign up to a streaming service to use voice control. Sonos should have made this clear you need a streaming service to use it. I dot. What to be forced into renting music

Misleading? They stated right in their annoncement what would be supported!


I think it's obvious that they said control your sonos with Alexa - you cannot


No, the announcement today specified exactly what sources could be controlled and how. No specifics were given before today, and if you assumed, . . . well . . . you know. But hey, plumbers gotta plumb, complainers gotta complain. One is who they are.


It's a comment forum, people complain, get over it
Userlevel 5
Badge +3
Im fairly sure the beta testers will have mentioned spotify, napster etc and locally stored music.

Its also my personal opinion that Sonos/Amazon have more than enough resource and technical ability to make these work. I choose to believe (whether accused of being a conspiracy theorist or not), that these are deliberate omissions owing to the fact that Amazon have their own music streaming service and the ability to host peoples own music libraries, for a fee of course.

Once amazon and sonos see that the orders coming in from the existing userbase for both thee the new hardware and the amazon streaming/storage offerings are starting to level out or tail off, then I believe thats when we will see spotify (and others) and local play becoming available.

Why would they offer people the ability to avoid the music storage membership fee right off the bat. They have free trials on the music service too, so the lack of spotify may prompt people to take up this, and who knows people may choose to leave spotify and go with amazon prime music unlimited after the free trial.

So imho the lack of spotify and local play is deliberate to at least force some people to try out the alternatives.
Is it not possible to add your local music to your Amazon Music Playlists and then play those via Alex/Sonos?

You can upload/match your music with Amazon and play it that way with full Alexa support. I believe it is $25/year for 250,000 tracks, but there may be a free allowance with Prime that I'm not aware of.
Poster melvimbe did a far better summation than I ever could right here:

https://en.community.sonos.com/amazon-alexa-and-sonos-229102/sonos-alexa-and-local-nas-stored-music-6791479/index1.html

I'm just guessing, kind of trying to reverse engineer the process, but I think it's going to be rather difficult. There are several different hints to suggest that Amazon/Alexa is completely in charge of determine what music will play when you make a voice command. I think it goes something like this.

1 - echo hears you
2- echo sends voice to Alexa servers
3 - Alexa servers translate voice to text
4 - Alexa servers process the request, determining what music to play on what speakers
5 - Alexa sends request to Sonos cloud.
6 - Sonos cloud sends request to your speakers.

I think step 4 is the key. Alexa has to know what music you want to play BEFORE it sends the request to the sonos cloud. It never sends an 'unknown' music request to the sonos cloud. So you may have a favorites playlist on Sonos, that Sonos knows what to do with, but since Alexa doesn't know what that is, it won't process it.

So for this to change, either Alexa needs to change to send unknown request to sonos, Alexa needs to know more about your sonos setup, or the two need to have a deeper back and forth exchange/communication so that Sonos can tell Alexa that it knows what that is.

Personally, I think changing this is a long way off. It requires Amazon/Alexa to change, and I don't think they are too motivated to do so.

BTW, some of the hints I see...
- You can't request any music on Sonos that you couldn't do on Amazon speakers.
- You can't give any commands (play, pause, volume control) on Sonos speakers that you couldn't do on Echos (like group, ungroup, line in source, etc)
- Alexa tracks what music you requested on it's 'cards' and in the history for that speaker. It could not do that if it didn't understand exactly what you requested.
- There are features from Sonos existing API that are not present with the interface with Alexa.

I would hazard to guess that Sonos is doing just about everything that it can do on it's side of the fence, and Amazon is the bottleneck. I wouldn't expect to see too many new features come across unless Amazon wants to do add the features. That could be because it benefits them, or because competition forces them to do something they don't exactly want to do.

So I think we will see echo's linked to specific sonos zones soon, because Amazon would want to build that feature, they would do the same for lights so users don't have to say the specific name of a light when they are in the same room. I think we will see playing form NAS or something like that if Sonos builds an interface with Google that allows that. Amazon may be pushed to do the same to stay competitive.


As to the accuracy of his guesses, Ryan S from Sonos says:

In short, melvimbe's analysis is pretty darn good, and on point. There would be work needing to be done on both sides of things for local libraries. There needs to be a cloud listing of your local tracks available when you'd want to listen to music, also with the knowledge of where or when to tell Sonos where to go. You can expect this Alexa integration to get better over time, we're constantly working on it. But I don't have any specifics on if or when we might get local libraries included. For those new to the thread, you can still use Alexa to control what's currently playing from any source, you just can't add something to the queue or start playing from certain sources with Alexa.
And many of us that are pleased with version 1, and looking forward to further versions. V1 is always the hardest, adding on may be difficult, but at least they have a running platform that answers many of the basic questions.

I happen to think they've done well. And I am 99% of the time using my NAS as the source of my music.
Userlevel 1
For me, as a Sonos owner for a decade now, there are two primary problems with this release.

#1 - A large community of product users use Sonos independent of the internet, because, it was a system released prior to the majority of streaming services, and certainly before any of them became useable.
As such, the idea that they have built integration with Alexa (granted a web based service) but have now (in beta at least) leveraged all the benefits of the voice capability to streamable services only totally ignores what is undoubtedly the core ownership of the product, and certainly the most loyal. It kinda borders on the ridiculous to be frank.

#2 - Sonos was designed (in part) to be a service to allow you to control all of your local music (sheesh I still have a CR100, all that could do was my local music at the time) and for many, many, MANY years that was it's entire selling point of the product until such a time as streaming became more accessible and popular and then it became "play every song on the earth" and random hyperbole like that.
So, you build a massive user base of people who have ripped and laboriously ID3 tagged their music libraries, and then you offer them the ability to voice control their system - you tease it for a year or more - and then when you release it, you do not provide the functionality that they have primarily used the system for?
Whomever in here is saying that makes sense is vastly deluded as how easy it is to alienate a consumer base.

What's sh*tty about this whole thing is, no-one knew Sonos were going to do anything with Amazon. The ECHO and DOT were out and ok, some people might have been talking about it and maybe some people on here were saying "hey, Sonos, Alexa, hmm?, hmmmm?" but that would have been it.
It's dangerous from a companycustomer relationship standpoint to open the door to questions like "did you only announce this so people would go and buy ECHO's and DOT's thus helping Amazon sell their product when Google was hot on their heels".
Because, it wouldn't be hard to make an argument for that when you consider it was Sonos who decided to announce Alexa functionality and they did it in a way which is totally opposed to the very thing the majority of their consumers use. Why do that?, why not just say nothing if it's so difficult to add local library functionality, until you figure out a way to do it?, and then announce :?

To me, this from the press release that still sits on the Sonos website is misleading:
"Sonos owners with an Alexa-enabled device such as an Amazon Echo or Echo Dot will soon be able to use Amazon’s popular Alexa service to control their Sonos sound system"

That part of the sentence is not true today.

Now sure, the press release goes on to say:
"Simply ask Alexa to play your music from Amazon Music, Spotify and more and it will flow to any group of Sonos speakers in the home. By integrating Alexa into their Sonos sound systems, owners can use their voice to play, pause, skip, control volume and more."

But aside the fact that Spotify isn't available, so that part of the sentence is partially baloney too - the former paragraph infers a myth that the rest of the press release does nothing to dispel.
Read it for yourself > http://press-us.sonos.com/134980-sonos-with-partners-and-industry-leaders-ushers-in-new-era-of-connected-home-listening <

I have always said, as a tech geek and someone that works in the tech industry that my Sonos was the best item of tech I have ever bought, but when a company does stuff like this, they are well on their way to losing people who advocate the brand.

IMHO. A Sonos products key market is not streaming. Very few people are buying Sonos kit costing in the hundreds (and in many cases thousands) of $ to play streamable content when they probably have a TV or a iPhone doc that can do that already. I'd actually be very interested to hear someone from Sonos look at the data of new hardware purchases and tell us what those people are using the product for, because I find it hard to believe that the main and best product feature of Sonos does not remain the local library functionality... and the company would do well to remember that when they decide to release like this.

And just to comment on people saying it's a much harder task than it appears.
I as a local library users of probably 3-4Tb of music, understand that voice recognition of all my ambiguous songs and artists is tough. I get that.
However what I don't get is why the first release doesn't have the ability to play (at the very least) playlists, this would be easy enough to push/send my playlist to my 'room' and then send the [play] command to, and a simple advisory to make the playlist names 'simple' would be all that's required.
So, I'm sorry, the idea that local library functionality couldn't in any way be made available is hooey to me. Especially when I can ask Alexa to play a song and there's no problem finding a sample version of it in the Amazon library, but I can't play the full high quality file sitting in my local library. That's pretty 😞 😠 to say the least.

Just my 2p.
Userlevel 4
Badge +1
For me, as a Sonos owner for a decade now, there are two primary problems with this release.

#1 - A large community of product users use Sonos independent of the internet, because, it was a system released prior to the majority of streaming services, and certainly before any of them became useable.
As such, the idea that they have built integration with Alexa (granted a web based service) but have now (in beta at least) leveraged all the benefits of the voice capability to streamable services only totally ignores what is undoubtedly the core ownership of the product, and certainly the most loyal. It kinda borders on the ridiculous to be frank.
I've also had Sonos for a while now, like you, and started when the only devices were the CR100 controller and the two zone players. You had no choice but to use a local library.

However, I suspect that since Sonos started making the standalone speakers, their core market has changed. With these speakers you don't need a network drive, just a music subscription...it's really simple to setup, especially now as it can just hook onto your existing Wifi... In looking at some of the Sonos One reviews linked elsewhere I couldn't help wondering when a Play:1 became a high quality device as described in the reviews. No dis-respect to Sonos, as I think for what they are they're very good, but they're about convenience not SQ. For that you need either a connect into a decent system, or you go outside Sonos for Hi-res music... But that tells us where the core Sonos market has shifted to, Yes you can stream via your phone to a bluetooth speaker, but most of them are truly awful (but cheap) and you have to remember to put your phone nearby, and you can't do multi-room. So I can see why the Sonos One and up appeal. Several family members now have simple Sonos systems with streaming subscriptions because it's just really easy to setup and use.

In some ways the real competition for Sonos is the likes of Amazon Echo as despite the fact that they don't properly support rooms, Amazon have now added multi-room music a la Sonos...

So I think it's a good move for Sonos to get involved in this space, but also having used it, I think the whole home voice assistant market is still in very early stages and will be changing rapidly. I suspect much of what Sonos want to do is not yet possible with Alexa, Siri or Google, but they're not big enough to go it alone either.

I prefer the integration with Alexa where I don't need to say "tell sonos...", and while the home brew integration is interesting, it's way too technical for 99.9% of users to get going, and even if simplified hugely, still requires a server device to handle requests between Alexa and Sonos. So I would hope that the official voice integration will improve over the next year quite a bit and although I'm also disappointed that control of the local library is missing, I hope it will come. I'm also resigned to the fact that I am in the minority of Sonos users now relying on a local library, and for serious high-res listening am already outside of the Sonos eco-system as a result.
Huh? :?
I would never want to have to run a local server, and I despise the "Tell XXXX to do YYYY" phrasing. No thank you. Sonos should do it right or not do it at all.

Leaving merely 6766 other viewers of this forum who might....


As of now, there is only one vote for and one vote against. You speculate all you wish, but I think I can say that after 9+ years of helping out on this forum, the requirement to both run a local server and regress to "Alexa tell Sonos to XXXX" instead of the current phrasing would cause an uproar of epic proportions. I'll take that experience over your "I think this way and 6766 other viewers might also" speculation.

Besides, there is a user (controlav) here who has developed just this kind of implementation via his own homegrown skill. If your speculation was correct, there would be no need for this thread, you could simply load his stuff and be a happy camper. Lord knows he is not shy in promoting it.
Userlevel 1
Badge +3
I am very disappointed the Sonos Alexa skill cannot play music from my local music library. I an frustrated that it can do track-level operations on albums I have played through direct Sonos control of my music library. I want it to do more and don't use streaming music sources, and never have.

Come on Sonos; get your lovely speaker SW ass in gear and (a) commit to providing Sonos Alex control of music library playing, and (b) deliver it promptly. We'll all love you for it.
Userlevel 1
Well here I am patiently waiting in Australia for Alexa to 'çontrol' my Sonos - and it finally arrived in Jan 2018. Already have 1's set up in stereo so no use getting a P1 with Alexa so went with an Echo Dot. As noted by my irate colleagues - can it play from my Sonos library ?? (the only reason I bought one) unbelievably no. Love my Sonos, very stable, great sound, handles my big library easily. However they perhaps should have given voice control a miss until one of the fundamentals was worked out. Anyone in the market for a brand new Dot - it tells jokes and knows the weather !
Badge +1
I have just activated a Sonos One in my system for voice. As Sparkydark says, lots of reading done prior to getting the One add on - to date I have been enjoying the Sonos systems I have, but wrongly assumed that my music library would be controlled by Alexa (which would appear to be a *fundamental*).

Here's hoping that UKMedia's report of the Sonos CEO committing to have this done results in it getting done!
Userlevel 1
Brutal. Man, I did a ton of reading and just bought Alexa and never thought to ask this because I thought it was a given. I feel pretty ripped off. My music library has some pretty rare tracks that you'll never find on any music service.
Thinking about taking it back.


You can still initiate the tracks on your music library from the app and then voice control afterwards - it's just the initiation part that doesn't work via voice. Not ideal but hopefully this will be sorted soon.


Let's be clear - this is a HUGE fail.

And, to be clear - look at Alexa on Amazon. Alexa has full knowledge of my Library, just unable to play it. WTF?
I’d just like to add my voice to the many ofhers here with a polite request for Sonos to implement this feature as soon as possible.
Userlevel 7
Badge +21
Come on people! This is a launch, it’s early days and who knows what constraints Amazon may have put on it. Of course in the first instance it works best with Amazon music services, but I’m sure more is to come. The fact that it can tell you what is playing from your own library is encouraging so I would expect control of local libraries can’t be far away. Why persecute the company? Is there any other independent with a similar offering?

I’ve enjoyed being part of the beta, it has come a very long way and will doubtlessly go further.

One thing I did realise is that personally I rarely know exactly what music I am to play and tend to leaf though the app albums or artists list for inspiration, much like flicking though a stack of lp’s in my youth. Being able to skip tracks with voice is very handy, especially when listening to the garbage that is 50% of tacks on “the difficult second album “.

Give Sonos a break, many have complained how long voice control has taken to arrive,or if it even would, and now the overwhelming response is unjustly negative.
Userlevel 7
Badge +21
Oh grow up. Honestly the moaning about a feature no other manufacturer other than Google or Amazon has is pathetic. Even Apple with it's wealth an resource has brought nothing to market yet.

I have all my music locally, and also have spotify so would love further integration but I fully expect that to come. If only the simplest of technical projects I work on for a major company could deliver in a year! And actually work!
Being able to have Alexa play one of my own imported playlists (or artists) is the #1 improvement I am hoping for for the Alexa/Sonos partnership.
Or maybe . . . just maybe . . . local library support is a lot harder to implement than streaming services, and Spotify is later than Amazon Music because Amazon created the API; so they would have a leg up on any other service.

In other news, Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK, Neil Armstrong actually walked on the moon, and Elvis is currently worm food.

Its also my personal opinion that Sonos/Amazon have more than enough resource and technical ability to make these work.


Perhaps, but I think you also have to factor in that Sonos was also working on developing the Sonos One and rebuilding their app at this time. Their resources are not unlimited. Amazon/Alexa has been rather busy with new products and features as well. Without inner knowledge of how all this is happening, you could make an argument either way.


I choose to believe (whether accused of being a conspiracy theorist or not), that these are deliberate omissions owing to the fact that Amazon have their own music streaming service and the ability to host peoples own music libraries, for a fee of course.


That is possible, but there are other reasons as well. Some reasons we can guess at, others we just don't know.


Once amazon and sonos see that the orders coming in from the existing userbase for both thee the new hardware and the amazon streaming/storage offerings are starting to level out or tail off, then I believe thats when we will see spotify (and others) and local play becoming available.


Actually, I think the biggest factor for pushing change and additional features is the competition. It's not a coincidence that Amazon and Google came up with improved sound quality after Apple Homepod was announced. Or that Google and Amazon both have calling features. So I'm betting the biggest motivator of getting more features with Sonos/Alexa is more features with Sonos/Google or Sonos/Apple.


Why would they offer people the ability to avoid the music storage membership fee right off the bat. They have free trials on the music service too, so the lack of spotify may prompt people to take up this, and who knows people may choose to leave spotify and go with amazon prime music unlimited after the free trial.


I honestly don't think it's really that much about the storage fee. I don't think it's a coincidence that Alexa came out with multiroom before integrating with Sonos. They are good with giving people the option of Sonos, but perhaps they don't want you be able to do anything with Sonos that you couldn't do with echos alone.

That isn't all of it though. It's a complex evolving market where you compete with your partners. Hard to really see motivations.


So imho the lack of spotify and local play is deliberate to at least force some people to try out the alternatives.


Maybe, but how many of these Sonos user who want to do voice control already had echos and tried out the alternatives already?
Userlevel 1
We are told that support for Spotify is on the way. I have no reason to doubt that. Is it reasonable to assume that Amazon wanted its own service to be supported first? Yes. Is this a "conspiracy"? No, it is a "business model".
After setting up Alexa and Sonos I can control Tunein Radio in various rooms with reasonable success; however, the as others have already mentioned access to my Sonos local music library (which I keep on OneDrive) is the key feature that I would like to see included. Like many others I don't subscribe to steaming music services.

With the announcement of Alexa integration into the Play:1 it would be likely that this functionality isn't far off for those of us that have an Echo, etc. It will be interesting to see what Alexa functionality the new Play:1 has and hopefully that should provide an indication of what's to come.
Is it not possible to add your local music to your Amazon Music Playlists and then play those via Alex/Sonos?
Userlevel 2
It just seems that in Sonos' zeal to stay relevant in the market they had to succumb to Amazon's will to make Sonos a better sounding Alexa speaker rather than give Sonos voice control. We waited over a year for this with the expectation that Sonos would get a voice. Instead we have a Sonos that wants to be just like Alexa. Too bad. I expect competitive pressure will change that.
It just seems that in Sonos' zeal to stay relevant in the market they had to succumb to Amazon's will to make Sonos a better sounding Alexa speaker rather than give Sonos voice control.

Stay relevant? I don't ever really look at sales and marketing figures, but it's my understanding that Sonos is doing a little better than staying relevant. Granted, it's pretty clear that a wireless speaker system that doesn't allow for voice control will become obsolete in the next few years. Sonos is really the first multi-room system to add voice control, at least with high quality speakers and multiple room configurations.

I do agree that it's likely that Sonos could not get everything it wanted from an integration with Alexa. And it's not as if Sonos has not stated that more features are to come.


We waited over a year for this with the expectation that Sonos would get a voice. Instead we have a Sonos that wants to be just like Alexa.


Hoh? Sonos has always said they were going to integrate with Alexa, not create their own voice assistant. I don't know why you were expecting anything different. Even then, Sonos's feature set are very much different from Alexa as far as quality, multi-room, and selection of services. No one could say that Sonos is just a copy cat of Alexa.

Too bad. I expect competitive pressure will change that.

Absolutely, and the fact that Sonos has stated that they want to work with Google as well is evidence that they think that as well.
Userlevel 1
At this point this looks more a limitation of Alexa integration/licensing, rather than a Sonos shortcoming. I bought my first Sonos component in 1997, and 11 years later it's still meeting my needs. But I bought a couple Alexa Dots in anticipation of voice control of my music library, just to enjoy the gimmick. Didn't happen, no big deal-I'll gladly jettison the Dots and control with my phone. Now, on to more important things-earbuds or headphones that let me enjoy my Sonos playlists throughout the house.