Sonos, Alexa and local NAS stored music

Plex and Sonos work already. from reading Ryan's answer regarding Alexa and Sonos and a local library - the issue is how will Alexa know what is on YOUR local library?

So there needs to be some place (on a Sonos account in the cloud? on your Plex cloud server? ) with a file listing your local library listings - with at least the library name, the album and maybe the title
and
that 'file' would have to be accessible and readable by both Alexa and Sonos - so that Alexa can see what you have and tell Sonos and Sonos knows what and where to get it.

I imagine the Plex / Sonos part would not be hard to program... however whether Amazon wants to do the programming for the Alexa / Sonos part would be the question.

however it certainly seems feasible.

And you would be well served to realise that the only difference between that amateur code being run client side and server side is publishing the app on amazon and having their servers talk to the sonos cloud instead of your own home server (and then duly paying for the processing time).

The invocation name, or lack thereof with amazon native interaction is down to amazon. With third party published apps the invocation name needs to meet criterea. Amazon can pick and choose their own, or indeed with third party offerings they can opt for direct control without an invocation name (i.e. smartthings smart devices).

Have you installed and tried the home brew solution? Have you seen first hand the differences between this and an officially published app?

You would be well served to gain an understanding of how minimal the changes would be to take this code and streamline it into a native amazon environment before dismissing the posts made by those who have. Amazon will have development teams capable of doing this within a week and have almost unlimited resources to do so. The reason for these functionalities not being available almost certainly lies with a commercial decision to drive consumers toward purchasing more hardware (playones with alexa) or AmazonMusic streaming or upload space.

Exactly my point for which I was accused of being a conspiracy theorist. I want to play my library and not be forced to subscribe to renting music. Plex is there and works, it is already set up to use Alexa. I thougtt sonos was supposed to be agnostic and instead I have to subscribe to amazon music google music or Apple Music

Plex and Sonos work already. from reading Ryan's answer regarding Alexa and Sonos and a local library - the issue is how will Alexa know what is on YOUR local library?

So there needs to be some place (on a Sonos account in the cloud? on your Plex cloud server? ) with a file listing your local library listings - with at least the library name, the album and maybe the title
and
that 'file' would have to be accessible and readable by both Alexa and Sonos - so that Alexa can see what you have and tell Sonos and Sonos knows what and where to get it.

I imagine the Plex / Sonos part would not be hard to program... however whether Amazon wants to do the programming for the Alexa / Sonos part would be the question.

however it certainly seems feasible.

Plex stores the library in the cloud via an external connection to my nas. I can use my library on any machine and browser. I have in fact been using it this evening remotely in the U.K. While my nas is running in LA. Plex has an app for sonos which requires the Plex library to be accessible externally and not locally. This works flawlessly. So there should have been no reason not to implement this unless amazon wants the user to be forced to rent music through an amazon subscription. As is, Alexa on sonos only works fully if you are subscribed to an amazon rental prOgram. You cannot use full functionality otherwise

I thougtt sonos was supposed to be agnostic and instead I have to subscribe to amazon music google music or Apple Music

Yeah, how un-agnostic of them to offer you all three of the major players in the space...

So there should have been no reason not to implement this unless amazon wants the user to be forced to rent music through an amazon subscription.

You forgot the equally logical reason that Sonos is doing this intentionally to offend you and you alone.

I, and others, have actually provided solid answers why this is the situation at beta launch. You've elected to ignore them.

I too have a vast library stored on a NAS drive, the vast bulk of it ripped from my CD collection. The NAS also contains some digital music purchased from Amazon, which is also (of course) held in Amazon's cloud storage. I do not subscribe to Amazon's Prime Music. In addition, I have a Premium Spotify account linked to my Sonos. I currently have one Echo Dot in the most-used room and an array of Sonos speakers in most rooms of the house. I'm enjoying being able to play some of my music (the stuff stored on Amazon's cloud storage) on any of my Sonos speakers using voice control. I'll look forward to having Spotify integrated so that I can also control that using my voice.
I accept that this implementation is beta and has limitations.
I had already worked out that room-grouping isn't yet available by voice-control but that if I pre-group in the Sonos app I can use Alexa to play music on that group by sending it to any of the rooms in the group.
I had also discovered that, while I can't yet select music from Spotify using Alexa, if I add music from Spotify to a queue by using the Sonos app, I can control playback using Alexa
So far, so good BUT...
I am disappionted to learn that using Alexa to play from my local library is not considered a development priority; I have fairly eclectic musical tastes and while I find much to enjoy on Spotify, many of the albums stored on my NAS are not available there and although a fair number of them ARE available on Amazon, I don't feel inclined to repurchase as a digital download music that I already own.
I may be past MY prime but I am far from being a luddite and have embraced both digital downloads and streaming as enthusiastically as my grandaughters.
I am both a music fan and a musician who has been lucky enough to play music from most genres from the early rock era of the fifties right through to today's music and my listening enjoyment covers everything from classical, through early blues and jazz, 40's big bands (Ellington, Miller, etc), jazz combos such as Artie Shaw and Miles Davis, the 'crooners' - Crosby, Sinatra, Nat Cole and so on, plus all the big names that have come and some sadly gone (Elvis, Lennon, Bowie, Hendrix, Joplin) through the rock and pop era. There are not many notable names in any genre that are not represented somewhere in my collection.
While this Alexa integration does not prevent me playing anything in my collection via my beloved Sonos app, I'm sure that I'm far from being alone in hoping that Alexa voice-control will at some point be extended to include my hard-earned locally-stored collection.
I come from a generation that doesn't expect instant gratification, so I'm prepared to wait but PLEASE Sonos/Amazon don't relegate my personal collection to the back-burner. I'm sure I'm not alone....

I too have a vast library stored on a NAS drive, the vast bulk of it ripped from my CD collection. The NAS also contains some digital music purchased from Amazon, which is also (of course) held in Amazon's cloud storage. I do not subscribe to Amazon's Prime Music. In addition, I have a Premium Spotify account linked to my Sonos. I currently have one Echo Dot in the most-used room and an array of Sonos speakers in most rooms of the house. I'm enjoying being able to play some of my music (the stuff stored on Amazon's cloud storage) on any of my Sonos speakers using voice control. I'll look forward to having Spotify integrated so that I can also control that using my voice.
I accept that this implementation is beta and has limitations.
I had already worked out that room-grouping isn't yet available by voice-control but that if I pre-group in the Sonos app I can use Alexa to play music on that group by sending it to any of the rooms in the group.
I had also discovered that, while I can't yet select music from Spotify using Alexa, if I add music from Spotify to a queue by using the Sonos app, I can control playback using Alexa
So far, so good BUT...
I am disappionted to learn that using Alexa to play from my local library is not considered a development priority; I have fairly eclectic musical tastes and while I find much to enjoy on Spotify, many of the albums stored on my NAS are not available there and although a fair number of them ARE available on Amazon, I don't feel inclined to repurchase as a digital download music that I already own.
I may be past MY prime but I am far from being a luddite and have embraced both digital downloads and streaming as enthusiastically as my grandaughters.
I am both a music fan and a musician who has been lucky enough to play music from most genres from the early rock era of the fifties right through to today's music and my listening enjoyment covers everything from classical, through early blues and jazz, 40's big bands (Ellington, Miller, etc), jazz combos such as Artie Shaw and Miles Davis, the 'crooners' - Crosby, Sinatra, Nat Cole and so on, plus all the big names that have come and some sadly gone (Elvis, Lennon, Bowie, Hendrix, Joplin) through the rock and pop era. There are not many notable names in any genre that are not represented somewhere in my collection.
While this Alexa integration does not prevent me playing anything in my collection via my beloved Sonos app, I'm sure that I'm far from being alone in hoping that Alexa voice-control will at some point be extended to include my hard-earned locally-stored collection.
I come from a generation that doesn't expect instant gratification, so I'm prepared to wait but PLEASE Sonos/Amazon don't relegate my personal collection to the back-burner. I'm sure I'm not alone....

You have described my situation to a "T". I have yet to order a Dot, although I have one teed up on amazon. Can you not add music to the Sonos Queue from your music collection, and play that queue with control by Alexa? I tend to play long playlists, often shuffled. Having the ability to control volume and turn off and on gets me pretty far along, although being able to select an obscure Sea Level or Johnny Winter track would be where I would like to wind up. I hope it is or becomes a development priority for all involved.

Yes, I can indeed both add to a queue from my NAS collection or select a playlist by using the desktop or phone/tablet app and then control playback using Alexa. However, listening to such a list often sparks a reminder of a song not currently in the list which I wish to add. At the moment I can't add a song 'on-the-fly' from either my collection or Spotify by using Alexa.
This is not a deal breaker, I can still use the app, but I'd been looking forward to not having to clean the bike grease from my hands (or dry my hands if I happen to be washing up) in order to do so....
(Sigh) I shouldn't complain of course, this is all a far cry from the fragile 78rpm records which formed part of my early listening experience or the ever-pulsing and fading reception of Radio Luxembourg....

Any number of points to make in this conversation.

1. Alexa skills are not installed on any Alexa device (Echo, Amazon phone app, Amazon Music phone app, Eufy, Sonos 1), they live in the Alexa (Amazon) cloud and are attached to Alexa accounts, so updates will happen without any user intervention or opinion.
1a. This means the skills can get better as fast as the dev/qa/release process for the skill writer works.
1b. Stodgy old users like me need to get over the idea of staying on a specific version with specific functionality.

2. How to enable local library playback is not a hard problem, but there are interesting error paths that are more complicated. If the Sonos privacy policy allows replication of one's music library index to their cloud systems, then local library playback is easier to implement -- the alexa cloud just turns names into text and throws it at the sonos cloud which either plays the track or throws back an error. A little easier said than done, but @controlav's skill does that if one has a Win10 box up all the time on one's local network to interact with the local library via the Sonos SOAP API. Sonos's policy of not talking about roadmap and work-in-progress with any detail means we really don't know how close they are.

3. I suspect the Sonos point of view is that with modern streaming services have so much content that many *not all* local library users don't realize how much they have access to via those services. I've surprised myself this evening about how much of my local library is available, even if it doesn't play from my local source. There have been enough misses that I still really need/want local library playback, but I can see enough of a different point of view.

4. As i've said before in another thread, don't underestimate what's required in standing up the Sonos cloud resources involved in all of this. lechmere-v1.ws.sonos.com, the Sonos CA for Oath secure logins, the Akamai configs, the auto-scaling to provide a "presence" of every HHID that has v8 installed in the Sonos AWS accounts, and making that reliable at the uptime requirements for such a large user population. There's a huge amount of work involved. (And from what I can see, it's been done using the right pieces.)

I have yet to order a Dot, although I have one teed up on amazon.

Before you spend any money, you can install either the Amazon app or the Amazon Music app on your phone and play around with it. You won't have the always listening aspect like an Echo or Sonos 1 -- you'll need to press something on the phone screen instead of saying "Alexa..." but you can speak every command and have it be processed just like an Echo would process it.

Likewise, I'm a little disappointed with the capabilities of the current Alexa integration. I have a comprehensive local music library, and don't have subscriptions to other music services. Its nice to see Sonos have released an Alexa skill , but for me its of limited use.