Cannot see group in device list help

@106rallye do you think it might be a good long term investment for Sonos to rework this? it is not sustainable for Sonos to integrate third party apps into their app, and it won’t be a good user experience (eg: I don’t like the Spotify integration coz it lack a lot of features). However, as noted by some others, this might be already supported.

@Ken_Griffiths thanks for this pointer! (@buzz too). A few thoughts and follow-ups.

Here is my setup:

1. Living Room: 1xEra300
2. Master Bathroom: 1xMove
3. Living Room TV: Arc, Sub3
4. Future: Master Bedroom (1xEra 300), Kids Rooms (1xEra 100 per room), Living Room (add another Era 300)

I am able to see all the “Rooms” (see items 1, 2, 3 in screenshot 1), but not my “Groups”, which folks seem to indicate are just Sonos app internal macros.

I am also able to tap the “three dots”, and then use “Group Rooms” option, which opens the Sonos app (see second screenshot) where I can group rooms. When I group the rooms here, they will show up in the Sonos app as a new group (screenshot 3 - “Living Room TV + 1”). This seems to indicate that groupings from the Sonos app are showing up in other apps as a “single speaker”. This solves most of the problems. 

However, the issue I am struggling with is the following two use case which are common for me. Most of the time I play music in my entire house (want the group with all speakers), but 1) when my kids are sleeping I don’t want to play in their rooms. 2) sometimes I want to play music in the living room, and my wife wants to play something else in the master bathroom, while my kids are taking a nap in the master bedroom. There are a few other combinations we used to do with our Google Home setup as well, but I hope this gives an idea.

At the moment, if I want to change one of these groupings, I have to follow these steps:

1. Tap on the speaker selection icon on Spotify
2. Tap the three dots
3. Tap the “Group Rooms” option which opens the Sonos app
4. Select the set of speakers I want
5. Press done to get back to Spotify and wait for the new grouping to get updated

This is a lot of extra steps compared to how I used to do this with Google Home groups. What I am curious is, if Spotify understands the grouping done in this manner, is there a reason that these groupings can’t be saved? @106rallye any thoughts on this? ​​​​​​​

You can create and save named groups. These are available in the Spotify App.

@buzz I am not seeing these saved groups in the Spotify app. For example, I have a group called "All", but this is not showing up on the Spotify app. However, I am seeing the manual group that is currently active ("Living Room TV + 1" in Spotify app). 

In the Spotify App go to Current device —> Group Rooms. Here you’ll be taken to your named Groups.

As per my comment above, it takes many extra taps to do this. Normally it takes 2 taps to switch the speaker group in Spotify, but if I want to use groupings like this for Sonos, it takes 7 taps. Given that Sonos groups are actually visible within Spotify, wondering why the “saved groups” are not directly showing up without these extra steps? 

@Ken_Griffiths this takes 7 taps for me from within the Spotify app when I want to start playing music. Is there a faster way to do it?

Most probably this type of use case is there for only a small number of people, but what is confusing to me is why saved groups don't behave the same way as grouping speakers together using the ellipses menu @Ken_Griffiths mentioned. Feels like an opportunity to simplify external integration UX?

PS: I was thinking about this more, and most probably Sonos is not letting you see the saved groups externally to simplify their handling of speaker conflicts (where two groups have the same speaker and two people are using those two groups). Google IIRC handles this by letting the second person win and switch over any conflicting speakers. 

Yes there are lots of much easier ways … but not via the Spotify App. Spotify would need to change these things.

Room ‘grouping’ can be done automatically ‘on the fly’ using Alexa and Alexa ‘enabled’ groups, or simply ask SVC to play to the Sonos Group, or there is a third party iOS App called ‘Soro’ that can make room grouping easier. Even Apple Airplay is perhaps a slightly easier option, but of course these things depend on which things you choose to use/have access to … you’re relying on Spotify ‘connect’ to do these things and that only works in the way described. 

I only use the Spotify ‘Free’ version, so I don’t use their App too often, but it appears you only need do these things once a day, if you do it regularly, every-day at similar times, for example, you could perhaps automate the room grouping using one of the methods described earlier (Alexa/SVC/Soro etc.) - the only other thing would be to perhaps submit a ‘feature request’ to Spotify or Sonos, I guess, but it may only save you a couple of extra ‘clicks’, but see what they say. 

Just to assist further you can speak to Sonos Support Staff to put the feature request forward via this link:

https://support.sonos.com/s/contact

Or speak to Spotify Customer Support via this link:

https://support.spotify.com/uk/article/contact-us/

I hope that assists. 👍