Alarm speaker grouping

  • 19 August 2019
  • 29 replies
  • 1338 views

Userlevel 2
I can see that this has been requested in the past but then the posts seem to die a death with no sign of the feature being implemented in the app so...again...why can't we set an alarm to play on a specific group of speakers rather than only having the option to "include grouped rooms"?

Use case: I have speakers in a bedroom, kitchen and living room. In the evening I often want to listen to music in the kitchen or bedroom while someone is watching TV in the living room so I ungroup my speakers. In the morning I want my alarm to play a radio station or play list on all speakers throughout the house. As it stands, unless I remember to re-group my speakers before going to sleep for the night the alarm will only play in the bedroom. Why can't I have a set of ticket boxes to select exactly what speakers to play the alarm on?

The only possible reason to not have this feature that I can think of is that it could cause confusion or frustration if an alarm interrupts a speaker that is already playing. For that case, why not have an additional Yes/No box to indicate whether I want my alarm to override a speaker if it's already playing or to ignore the active speaker and only sound on those that don't already have something playing?

Thankfully I have found a workaround to implement this feature myself by using a third party home automation hub but all this does is suggest that the feature can definitely be easily implemented as it's been achieved via reverse engineering and for Sonos not include it in their own app is just either poor design or laziness.

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29 replies

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So I take it the alarm functionality still hasn’t been fixed? Even after the numerous requests on this forum? Amazing how such basic functionality isn’t available for a product which USP is having sound everywhere / multiple rooms / zones etc.

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Nope. Nothing changed. It annoys me enormously that every morning it’s a crapshoot which rooms are still grouped with the room with the alarm.

Userlevel 7
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You can read an ex-Sonos employees thoughts on many things, including the process to add the original Alarm feature, here: https://morganlinton.medium.com/three-things-i-learned-about-product-during-the-early-days-of-sonos-bdc37975bab8

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You can read an ex-Sonos employees thoughts on many things, including the process to add the original Alarm feature, here: https://morganlinton.medium.com/three-things-i-learned-about-product-during-the-early-days-of-sonos-bdc37975bab8

Thanks for sharing this. The article itself doesn’t really give any new insights into the “alarm” functionality other then that they are struggling with this for a long time. Shame they can’t (or rather, won’t) solve this properly, especially given all the thought they put in other aspects of the product (e.g. packaging).