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I have Sonos 1,3 and 5 setup in my house and I use the new Sonos app.

I have over 200gb of my own music, most are in .Flac files. How do others access their own music collection? I've tried copying onto a microsd card , inserting that into my mobile device, clicking on This Mobile Device option , didn't work. I could go down the NAS or my cloud mobile route but this is expensive. Currently have the data on my laptop and on an external 1tb HDD drive. How can I access via my mobile device and play through my Sonos speakers? It's a pain firing up my laptop each time I want to listen to something from my collection.

Thanks for any help

Does your router not have a USB port to share storage onto the network? You might need to tweak its config in order to enable SMBv1.


Hey ratty, no it doesn't. I have a standard sky router and sky fibre max. I was thinking about buying a new router with usb and connecting this with my external HDD drive. You think this will work? 


Hey ratty, no it doesn't. I have a standard sky router and sky fibre max. I was thinking about buying a new router with usb and connecting this with my external HDD drive. You think this will work? 

So long as the router is able to support SMB/CIFSv1 it should work fine. Note however that it could be the luck of the draw whether your external drive will spin down when idle. This might not matter to you.

But decent routers aren’t cheap. Unless you hate the Sky router you might be better off simply getting a basic NAS.


Then I also need to consider compatibility with sky if I go new router way. Sky won't support my own router. I'll look closer at the NAS way.  How do other Sonos users listen to there own library? Maybe I'm the last surviving dinasour wanting such a thing. Perhaps I can upload my library to Spotify ?

Thanks

 


I don’t know what cloud services that are supported by Sonos would allow FLAC upload. Spotify doesn’t.

A basic single drive Western Digital NAS is a bit over £100. You’d keep a backup on your existing USB drive.

Alternatively look at a cheap combo travel router/extender/access point with a USB port. There are TP-Link units for around £40. They’d stream fast enough for music, but bulk uploads would require a lot of patience.


Think I'm going for the my cloud home. Just need to find out if Sonos support and allow access to it.


You may need to explicitly enable SMB version 1 support. Sonos still requires it. 


I just hate to enable SMB v1 on a NAS that will have real data on it. Read up on the v1 security issues and be prepared to deal with them if you get unlucky.

I use a tiny Raspberry Pi computer for my Sonos library, they can be a storage server or just act as an SMB v1 gateway to your real NAS. A Pi Zero W is plenty for streaming to Sonos.

 

The Travel router with an embedded server sounds interesting too.