Why do you expect that you’re going to go to “joyless non-musical hell”? 

I hope to be looking into joyless non-musical hell through an inverted periscope. A really tall periscope. 

The CEO sets the tone and the culture of a company, and that drives quality for paying customers, or not. Rather than posting apologies he should have ordered a rollback, and then resigned. 

I have six Sonos speakers. And my guess is, that I now have numerous "systems" on my one wifi network. When I do various combinations of rebooting my router, factory resetting devices, uninstalling/reinstalling apps on android/iPad/Windows - I've tried it all - I wind up seeing some of my devices at any given time. I had ALL of it working the other day, and today, I see some portion of my devices. If I do it all again I will see some other portion.

It's all * .  I have no trust left. 

*Moderator Note: Modified in accordance with the Community Code of Conduct.*

To be more specific, because I have spent untold numbers of days and hours in joyless non-musical Sonos hell. It’s burnt into my soul. I don’t want Sonos support. What do you do if you’re in hell? Go to Hell Support? For…? 

I have enough bitterness left in me to write this flame farewell. I gave you my heart Sonos. I gave you my consumer dollars. And you abandoned my life time accumulation of music to push Sonos Radio at me. And you degraded the stability of my user experience to the point of complete dysfunction. 

Farewell. 

On the subject of the stability of my Sonos system it is only fair that I follow up with a report that the majority of my recent issues were entirely self-inflicted <says with egg on my face>. I had a serious hardwiring issue with my new Orbi wifi system. I attempted to set up my system with “backhaul” hardwiring from the Orbi satellites back to the router, and I messed it up such that essentially everything on my network was hardwired together all the way back to my CenturyLink router, thus creating loops that confused the heck out of everything. As I was factory-resetting Sonos speakers and connecting them to my new system I think they were being rather randomly configured to exist on either my wifi network, or the CenturyLink network. Regardless of my blunder Orbi was trying really hard to make things work, and it succeeded about half of the time thus confusing the heck out of me. Argghh!! Once I fixed that issue everything started working.

This however still does not address the Sonos app problem of crippling my local music library.

It’s honest and decent of you to “confess”! I’m glad that aspect of your system is sorted; hopefully the music library improvements will be with us soon…

My Roon Nucleus One arrived. It set itself with the greatest of ease, found my NAS and indexed my music library for me, and it will also stream to my existing Sonos speakers via AirPlay2. Rather brilliant. 

And the Roon app experience compared to Sonos is over the top good. It blends together searching of my local music library, with the TIDAL streaming service. 

Simple back to back comparison:
Pull up the Roon app and search for Blackbird. The Roon app takes you to exactly what you would expect: Blackbird by the Beatles, White Album.

Pull up the Sonos app and search for Blackbird. The mobile app returns a stew of results that are mostly “Blackbird Station”, and artist albums by that name.   

Try something more modern like Cruel Summer by Taylor Swift. Same exact thing. In both cases on the Sonos app, the thing you’re after is somewhere down below if you scroll a bunch, if at all. 

There’s also a clear separation between browsing the internet, and MY library. Roon will even show me my music sorted by “most played”, which means I can easily get back to something I played recently. The experience above is the #1 reason I am departing the Sonos ecosphere. It’s not even the proprietary hardware issue. It’s the daily app experience.

Sonos! Go back to your roots and core customer base. 

 Are you putting your music in the ROON Nucleus?  If so
Maybe Sonos can index the music on your Nucleus.  Should be able to Browse to the ROON Nucleus music folder from the Sonos app on a PC or Mac.  Go to Music Library Settings - Add.  Choose the third option then Browse.  Maybe the Nucleus can be found then indexed.

 I had ROON for a year.  Spent hours adding 16/9 photos to fill all the blank spaces in the Artist category.  Imagine how many artists are involved in an opera.  What was cool is I could play that opera and on my iPad the artist photos would cycle showing each one for around 5 seconds.  Real cool until an update changed the format from 16/9 to round.  Bye bye ROON.

Try using ‘Sonos streaming’ rather than Airplay2. It’s marginally better quality: 24/48 as opposed to 16/44.1.

 Kevin:

 For some reason I did not notice the fact your library is already on a NAS.  Did you have issues getting Sonos to index your library on that NAS?

https://help.roonlabs.com/portal/en/kb/articles/sonos#:~:text=Sonos%20hardware%20is%20fully%20supported%20in%20Roon!

 Would this make AirPlay unnecessary?

Airplay isn’t necessary anyway for Roon to Sonos. Roon is able to stream as FLAC up to 24/48 to Sonos renderers, and group players as required.

Why use Sonos’ library playback, which continues to have issues, when Roon provides a much richer and responsive experience.

 Would another advantage using ROON be its ability do down convert to 24/48?  If the ROON core is run with a powerful CPU that would work well.

 In my case, using Sonos, I had to convert higher sample rate files to 24/48 then put them in a Sonos specific folder and add them to a Sonos specific playlist.  So I might have a playlist called Violin Concertos & Violin Concertos ( Sonos ).  Sonos works well for me so I really don’t need ROON.  Anyway the ROONies made those artist pictures round.  What were they thinking!

 I do have systems that will play those higher sample rate files, but when I want to play classical orchestral music the Arc-Sub 3-300s do it better, do it larger.

The Nucleus looks great. I have a rather large library so would be interested in the maximum HD size of the Nucleus.

It is unfortunate Roon does not do Spotify though. We’re a Spotify Family.

Roon Core on an 11th gen Core i3 has at least 20x the required CPU horsepower to downsample a stream from 192kHz on the fly, do R128 volume levelling, apply crossfeed, execute 7-band PEQ, etc etc.

Sonos needs 48kHz. Other devices I use can take 96 or 192 without conversion.

Why pay a subscription for software just to play back music I own and add yet another single point of failure as every speaker streams from it rather than independently?

Room has its purpose if you want the expanded sleeve note metadata, but for just playing back music it is an expensive overkill imo.

I did evaluate it, but as I just want music playback and don’t care for the expanded sleeve notes side of it, assetupnp + bubbleupnp server and an openhome controller app give me local media, Qobuz/Tidal, the ability to turn any upnp render device into a chromecast or openhome renderer with lightweight, easy to replace/run multiple containers on any machine.

The OP had already bought into Roon.

Fine. I’ve also messed with Asset (long ago), Bubble, etc and other DLNA bits and bobs.

I use local music and Qobuz. Roon offers discovery, information and library management features that I appreciate. And MUSE DSP for endpoints that need it. The app is a responsive joy, not a frustration. The cost? A small fraction of my annual car insurance.