Sonos, Alexa and local NAS stored music

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.

No im not joking

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.
But one must subscribe to some service from Amazon? Which one? And what happens to lossless files uploaded when they are accessed for replay?

As far as I know, Sonos only supports Plex on a local server, not the cloud, and quite frankly, the Plex implementation is terrible and Plex basically abandoned it soon after it launched.

If you had implemented it properly you would know you have to set up the Plex media server to be fully accessible to the internet which allows the plex to access the library locally. Plex works fine for me in the app, on the sonos desktop app and works fine allowing sonos to quickly pull all music directly form the app without having to use the Plex source explicitly . It is also far faster to browse than using the standard sonos local library source. Much better.

As I said, somebody obviously love Plex. It is decidedly different opinion from the majority here at the Sonos forum.

OK - i have no idea what Plex is, and having struggled with something called Groove after loading some music onto my OneDrive and i cant make it appear on my iphone app, this all seems like a bit of a mess? My files are encoded in ALAC, dont know whether OneDrive/Groove doesnt like this? (Steve Jobs would turn in his grave with all this complexity!)

All i want to do is store my ALAC files in the Cloud (prefer OneDrive as there is 1Tb for me) and play them on Sonos...and hence get rid of my NAS. I dont want any Match or any other service ....Can it be done simply?

Thanks for your help btw, its not a comment on the folks here who are trying to help and i do appreciate it!!

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.

It's crazy to have to force people to put there music in the cloud. Don't forget how much extra internet traffic it will cause. If you're close to your ISP's limit, this will put you over

OK - i have no idea what Plex is, and having struggled with something called Groove after loading some music onto my OneDrive and i cant make it appear on my iphone app, this all seems like a bit of a mess? My files are encoded in ALAC, dont know whether OneDrive/Groove doesnt like this? (Steve Jobs would turn in his grave with all this complexity!)

All i want to do is store my ALAC files in the Cloud (prefer OneDrive as there is 1Tb for me) and play them on Sonos...and hence get rid of my NAS. I dont want any Match or any other service ....Can it be done simply?

Thanks for your help btw, its not a comment on the folks here who are trying to help and i do appreciate it!!

The only Cloud services currently supported by Sonos are Amazon, Google Play Music, and Apple. Amazon is free for 250 tracks and ~$25/year for 250k tracks. Google is free for 50k tracks, Apple requires a full Apple Music subscription. The only one fully compatible with Alexa at this time is Amazon. The others require initiating play on the Sonos app, then you can control playback via Alexa.

None of these accept ALAC files. Instead, they will match/convert your files to a high bitrate MP3 or Apple AAC codec.

JGatie - thankyou for a very clear answer! I guess I will wait before I spend £500 on a new NAS as the situation may change

So how does a local controller app query the local music library? Presumably there is some kind of interface to the players that lets it browse/search the library index held on each Sonos player? I would guess that once you have selected your music it then puts an entry in the player Q that lets the player find the track and play it. Already on the Sonos app with search you can see there is a delay between finding local matches and remote ones on streaming services. For Alexa, that delay will be the other way round.

If that's the case, what's to stop the Echo devices issuing the same query to the Sonos players asking for matching results that the controller app does? Alexa could then pass that result back to the Amazon servers to process further before sending it back and on to the player?

The Alexa support for Amazon is not an exact science presumably, Alexa is just talking directly to a Amazon music right now. When I say "Alexa play Queen in the kitchen" what will happen when more than one service is supported? Where will Alexa/Sonos choose to get the music from?

I would hope that you could configure a search order in the Alexa skill. At that point surely your local library is then just another service, that only you have access to...

CChris (or anyone else with good familiarity with the Amazon Cloud offering) - Having already been stung royally by Amazon in recent months (more to follow), I really need to ask whether Amazon will truly store/mirror ALL the music on your local server or NAS in its cloud- or whether for commercial, DRM or any other conceivable reason, selectively NOT store/mirror some of what's in your library?

The reason I'm skeptical and am asking this question, is that some 3 months ago, I purchased a Fire HD tablet - along with a 128 GB micro SD card- for the express purpose of using it as a Sonos Controller..After tediously moving my 105 GB local library into the Fires's Music Folder on the microSD card, I was shocked to discover that the Fire was only "acknowledging" (for lack of a better term) 33 GB of the music in the Music folder, had relegated 40 GB of it to a folder called "Other", and god only knows what it did with the other missing 35 GB...The Sonos Controller, of course, could only index the 33 GB of music it found in the Music folder (Sonos confirmed that there's no way for me to force the Controller to index the music that the Fire had moved to the "Other" folder...) And Amazon tech support - which is singularly the most clueless tech support organization I have ever come across - was ineffably ignorant and unable to suggest anything other than that it was a hardware problem with the microSD card...The microSD card, incidentally, works perfectly in all 3 of my laptops and shows - and plays - all 105 GB of music in the Music Folder...( I won't bore anyone with further details, but suffice it to say, I've spent countless hours trying to figure this out, and have looked at everything from file types to codecs as possible causes of Amazon's/Androids mutilation of my music folder...)

In any event, this recent experience underlies my skepticism and my question...(I would LOVE the answer to be that I could trust Amazon to store my entire library, since CChris's idea is an excellent one...)

Thanks to everyone for a great exchange of ideas in this thread!