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Contributor I
March 22, 2019

Sonos and Alexa ducking

  • March 22, 2019
  • 16 replies
  • 1043 views
Hi everyone, I know this has been covered extensively but I'm mighty confused, so please bear with me (and help if you can!).

I have a Sonos One in our kitchen, a Sonos Connect in our bedroom, and our kids have recently got Echo Dots in each of their bedrooms.

The upstairs devices are currently ducking whenever the kids use their Echo Dots. I've had a look at how to stop this happening and thought the answer was that I'm supposed to set up a group on the Alexa app to include all of those devices where I don't want ducking to occur. So I've set up a group "Upstairs" and included the kids' echo dots, and our bedroom Sonos. But it's still ducking..... I haven't set a preferred speaker because we all want to be able to play different radio stations in our own bedrooms (leaving aside the frustration of the fact we can't all use Spotify despite having a family premium account but that's a whole different issue), not have them all playing the same thing (which is what I think setting a preferred speaker would do).

Can anyone help? Is it that I should instead have the kids' echo dots in one group, and our two Sonos devices in a different group? Confused....

Thank you!
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    16 replies

    March 22, 2019
    Hi. You include in a group the devices that you DO want to duck when the Alexa device for the group receives a command., not the ones you don't want to duck as you have stated.
    fordybeeAuthor
    Contributor I
    March 22, 2019
    Ah, but I don't want any of them to duck out, only the device in the room I'm in when I speak to Alexa. So we have 3 Alexa devices in different rooms, so I need to set up 3 separate groups with just each device in that group?
    March 22, 2019
    Yep
    fordybeeAuthor
    Contributor I
    March 22, 2019
    Thank you!
    March 22, 2019
    And use preferred speaker to get sound from speaker not the Dot.
    fordybeeAuthor
    Contributor I
    March 22, 2019
    Ok thanks - the kids don't have separate speakers, their sound comes from their dots, and in the kitchen we just have the Sonos One so I'm guessing I just leave preferred speaker unset...
    fordybeeAuthor
    Contributor I
    March 22, 2019
    Although actually I don't want the kids being annoying and changing what's playing in our Sonos devices, so I guess I should set their dots as their preferred speakers, then they'll only be able to control the music in their own rooms. Ok, I think I've got it - thanks so much.
    March 22, 2019
    Although actually I don't want the kids being annoying and changing what's playing in our Sonos devices, so I guess I should set their dots as their preferred speakers, then they'll only be able to control the music in their own rooms. Ok, I think I've got it - thanks so much.Hmmm. I think they can still say 'play xxxx in the kitchen'
    fordybeeAuthor
    Contributor I
    March 22, 2019
    Ho hum, can't stop the little blighters doing everything I guess 😳
    March 22, 2019
    Regarding the Spotify issue you mentioned in passing.... you just need to buy the kids a Play:1 each and you can all play separste Spotify streams using the Sonos spp!