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Speakers are auto grouping

  • 9 March 2019
  • 8 replies
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When I ask Alexa to play a radio station it is now grouping all the speakers in the house and playing that station through them. This is a new issue and not how it used to work. Before I would ask Alexa to play a station or song and it would just play them in the current group of four speakers. Now it is grabbing the bathroom speaker and adding that to the group automagically. Not sure what has changed and if there is a way to change it back. I’ve been scaring the crap out of my wife in the mornings with this new development and would like to get things back to the way they were.
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Best answer by el_matt0 11 March 2019, 12:37

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8 replies

Userlevel 2
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I believe I might be experiencing similar behaviour with my setup (as of 1 day ago, without having made any changes myself). See the other thread I just created. Essentially my Sonos Ones are now playing back music through multiple Sonos speakers (ie all through the living room) where they previously would just playback on the Sonos Ones themselves. I think it has to do with the fact that under the Alexa app my room grouping had auto selected all of those sonos speakers as the "preferred speakers". Sadly I can't seem to UNselect the unwanted speakers there, or figure out any other fix/workaround!
Userlevel 5
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This sounds like you have created a group in Alexa. Once you do so, Alexa play commands will automatically create Sonos groups. I have no clue why el-matt0 is unable to ungroup in Alexa
Userlevel 7
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There has been an Alexa updated rolled out by Amazon over the last few days, that will automatically create an Alexa Group for every Sonos speaker. While you'll still be able to make groups the same as before, Alexa is going to default to creating automatic groups for your Sonos speakers that aren't in an Alexa Group. The auto-group creation applies only for people with existing Echo devices linked to Sonos systems. Alexa will put each Sonos speaker not already in an Alexa Group into an Alexa Group and set it as the "Preferred Speaker." These groups will not be created for people who don't own any Echo devices.

It should still be possible to open the Alexa App and amend these automatically created Groups.
Userlevel 2
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Thanks for the info. Unfortunately I was unable to amend the auto grouping by removing the unwanted Sonos speakers from the Alexa preferred speakers. Based on your comment, is the temporary workaround to create new Alexa groups for the speakers that are playing incorrectly (ie split them out to their own independent Alexa groups)?

When removing various speakers from the current Alexa room, I end up in a nasty loop where Alexa will acknowledge the music playback request but then no sound comes out (and both Sonos and Spotify apps show no activity - so whatever changes made in the Alexa app appear to have broken the Spotify connect functionality). I even tried “forgetting” the speakers in the Alexa app and re-creating the Alexa group, to no avail!
Userlevel 2
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It is auto grouping my sonos speakers that are within the same Alexa group. So not exactly what you described.
Userlevel 2
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Seems fixed this morning. Recreating the Alexa group, then fiddling with the preferred speaker setting seems to have done it. It now works properly with both my living room Sonos speakers (playbar sub etc) in addition to the Sonos Ones all within a single Alexa group, but the music playback now properly comes only from a Sonos Ones, as desired.
Userlevel 7
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Seems fixed this morning. Recreating the Alexa group, then fiddling with the preferred speaker setting seems to have done it. It now works properly with both my living room Sonos speakers (playbar sub etc) in addition to the Sonos Ones all within a single Alexa group, but the music playback now properly comes only from a Sonos Ones, as desired.

I suspect that the cloud update was done in stages. Glad it's all working now. 🙂
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Yeah! Thanks for the help. Alexa was adding the bathroom speaker to the rest of them in the house. I was able to turn it off in the devices section of the amazon Alexa app.