Playing Local Music Library on Sonos through Alexa

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Agree. It makes sense in that what is in it for amazon otherwise? Other than all the user data they will nine by people using Alexa that they can sell on or use. Before long you will not be able to purchase bay media and instead will only rent it.

You can use Alexa to start playing from Amazon Music, Amazon Music Unlimited, Pandora, iHeartRadio, SiriusXM, TuneIn Radio, and we’re working to bring Spotify controls in the future too. Alexa doesn't have access to your local music library.

Also, any Alexa device on your account can use basic controls, such as play, pause, volume, and skip, on your Sonos players. This works for all services and music on Sonos, started through the Sonos app.

We don't have any specifics on what's up next, or if local library will be working for the future, but the skill will be improving over time, so you never know what might get added next.

Hey Ryan. Long time listener (2005 convert from Bang and Olufsen) first time caller... ;-> I know you guys are probably up to your ears but I want to be sure to double-down on the comments of many others on this forum.

Notwithstanding the commentary of the smart-mouthed trolls on this thread (you know who you are) -- this is a big problem for many of us. The my library function is important and has been the basis of Sonos from day one. We've generally curated our libraries with dozens of playlists, favorites, etc. that are not replicable (without a metric butt-ton of effort) on cloud services. We've chosen Sonos as our platform and used it as such.

The beauty of Sonos has been that it is music system agnostic - but the basis has always been the support of a local music library. I'd be surprised if you didn't find a majority of your users still see that as one of the primary differentiators of Sonos. In fact... once the dot launched, our curated libraries were one of the primary reasons to stick-it-out with Sonos rather than moving to a fully Amazon solution.

If other users are like me, we don't really care about timing, just don't be cagey about it - no frustrated user wants to hear "it will get better but we don't know how and we don't know when". We all understand the challenges; push through them, climb over them, go around them.

I probably won't check back - too may trolls on this thread already, just wanted to voice my opinion as a dedicated and long time Sonos supporter. Thanks for listening.

Cheers, Jens.

Thanks for sharing, Jens! We love getting the feedback and we'll keep sharing with the team so they know what people are asking for. You can use voice to control what's currently playing, just not start playback from an unqueued local library.

There is no doubt that any reasonable thinking person would expect this integration to play your local music library whatever the releases say. Are they mad? It can't be a technical issue surely, purely to fill the coffers. I have a CD collection going back to Brothers in Arms around 1980 and a Sonos system that plays them (ripped of course). I use basic Napster but why soak the Internet if much of what I want is locally stored and setup in my playlists. Seriously annoying. If you only pay for streaming services you have to do that FOR LIFE if you want music.