Sonos, Alexa and local NAS stored music

If you have a catalogue of historic recordings, or are looking for specific recordings or artists and your genre is classical and opera etc, the streaming services are poor. Also having added one or two recordings to my Sonos playlist, sometimes when I return to them say 6 months later they have disappeared from the streaming service.
Kumasi, I hope you are wrong about NAS support being unlikely. If you play classical or opera you don’t generally mess about with the sequencing, although you do pause, adjust volume maybe.

There has been so much hype about it all, so I guess disappointment is almost inevitable...

Thanks for your answers.

Of course, if the playing of personal tracks is something of paramount importance, Amazon will gladly provide a cloud hosted option for $25 a year.

Depending on the up time your own Nas has, and your personal electricity costs, this could actually be a more attractive route for some users.

My personal server which is now mainly used for NAS and backups is currently running at about 75p ($1)/day in electricity costs. So £273 ($365) a year. I can't rememebr the last time I actually used the server for plex, and viewing photos/videos from a cloud storage facility is just as easy.

If I pushed more of my media onto a cloud storage facility, not only could I scale back the home server and reduce electricity costs, it could also make the media a lot more accessible.

I have been one of the techy die hards for ages. I have two racks of server and network gear in the home, and a 32TB freenas server with plex, backup, etc setup was something that appealed. But I think the time has come to reassess this strategy and a move to the cloud could actually save me a small fortune.

I hope you are wrong about NAS support being unlikely. If you play classical or opera you don’t generally mess about with the sequencing, although you do pause, adjust volume maybe.
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To clarify: it is just voice control we are talking about, not the use of NAS in general. And that too, just the starting command with further actions possible via voice control.

Plex implementation is fine. Don't know what rubbish you are spouting about saying implementation is terrible.
You have got to be joking - unless it's changed drastically in the last couple of months, then it's useless if you have varied tastes in music. The web version is very flexible, but the Sonos implementation is so limited that it's unusable.

Actually, the One is going to be platform agnostic. You will be able to select the voice assistant you wish to use, with Google being next on the slate.

Indeed, Sonos shouldn't be reliant on Amazon so much. The Brilliant controller (https://en.community.sonos.com/controllers-software-228995/brilliant-controller-6788719) has multiple Assitants such as Google and Alexa and also has its own. Surely Sonos could implement something themselves to fill the gap.

CChris - you make an interesting point on Cloud Services. Do I take it that Amazon Drive is accessed just like a NAS FROM Sonos? Is the delay in starting acceptable assuming a reasonable BBand speed? Also does it handle the album art ok which is often a pain imo?

Any tips on setting up?

I have tried to add onedrive as a path in sonos but it doesnt like it. Any tips how to do it? Seems to throw a blue exclamation mark just outside the path field

As there have already been homebrew apps that can do all of the above (address local libraries, group/ungroup etc), that have been running using amazon alexa, then I would say it absolutely is technically possible without too much involvement from either side.

https://github.com/rgraciano/echo-sonos
https://github.com/jishi/node-sonos-http-api

The setup above uses a personal amazon app (not published), and works using a pc in the home which just gives http get commands to the sonos cloud. It really wouldnt take much at all for that to run on amazon or sonos backend, so there must be some other reason these features were not made available. Either Amazon wants to try and force people down the Amazon prime music route, or they got so hung up on what they wanted to produce, that they never bothered to ask or look what the consumer actually wanted.

Really is pathetic that sonos released a version that in now way matches the amatuer code. I do not want to be forced into renting music.

Agreed. It's a lame implementation. Sonos have dropped the ball big time in last few years and this is too little to late

CChris - you make an interesting point on Cloud Services. Do I take it that Amazon Drive is accessed just like a NAS FROM Sonos? Is the delay in starting acceptable assuming a reasonable BBand speed? Also does it handle the album art ok which is often a pain imo?

Any tips on setting up?
One thing to also research here is availability of your music stored on Cloud Services in lossless form for replay - if you set store by lossless for sound quality. I don't but many do and this may be a deal breaker for them.

CChris - you make an interesting point on Cloud Services. Do I take it that Amazon Drive is accessed just like a NAS FROM Sonos? Is the delay in starting acceptable assuming a reasonable BBand speed? Also does it handle the album art ok which is often a pain imo?

Any tips on setting up?

Amazon Drive (Cloud, whatever it is called now) allows you to upload and/or match your personal library in the cloud and access it via your Amazon music account via Alexa (and the Alexa/Sonos implementation). If you do this, your personal library will be fully supported via Alexa on Sonos, and there is no need to subscribe to the full Amazon Unlimited subscription. At this time, it is the only way to play all (up to 250,000 tracks) of your library with full Alexa support through Sonos.