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As I previously discovered in another thread, streaming to Sonos using Airplay 2 causes the existing Sonos groups to be immediately ungrouped.

Assuming we have a hypothetical setup of 3 groups Sonos speakers, which have been grouped in the Sonos app, the following behaviour is exhibited:

  • Starting an Airplay stream to Speaker A will cause speakers B and C to immediately ungroup. Playback will continue on Speaker A only.
  • While Airplaying to A, grouping A, B, and C, will allow the Airplay stream to be propagated from A to B and C using the Sonos protocol so the stream stays in sync across all speakers. 
  • After Pausing or stopping for a minute or two, playing the Airplay stream will again immediately ungroup the speakers. The speakers must again be regrouped in the Sonos app.
  • You cannot use multiple Airplay streams to stream to multiple speakers. For some reason, Sonos speakers will drift out of sync when doing this. The only way to use Airplay with multiple speakers is to regroup using the Sonos app.

This makes using Airplay with anything more than a single Sonos speaker prohibitively difficult. 

Expected behaviour:

  • Starting an Airplay stream to Speaker A should not ungroup speakers B and C, but instead propagate the stream to Speakers B and C using the Sonos protocol (as if it had been grouped again in step 2).

I understand this is likely to be a conflict between the Airplay spec and the Sonos spec. However, it can  be solved in a couple of ways:

  • By adding a checkbox in settings which says “Prevent Airplay from ungrouping and making Groups”, which when checked, causes the Sonos system to ignore Airplay grouping/ungrouping commands.
  • Expose Sonos Groups to airplay so that an airplay stream can be streamed directly to an existing group.

This is a common issue which is discussed occasionally on other communities like reddit. This is the single issue preventing myself and others heavily engaged in the Apple ecosystem from going all-in on Sonos, especially as Apple continues to push the importance and integration of Airplay. 

It’s a simple thing, but if it could be fixed, it would make a lot of people very happy, and we would feel more confident investing money into larger multi-speaker multi-room Sonos setups.

Many thanks

Hi @mochimochi,

 

I have already submitted your feature request as noted on the previous thread last month. We appreciate your feedback, but as I noted in the last thread, this is likely due to restrictions in the Airplay API and not a deliberate restriction on our part. What might seem like a simple change could, in fact, require a major re-write of a third-party software kit to work around.

I have passed on your suggestions again, but we have nothing else to add at this time. :slight_smile:  

Thanks @James L. - I just wanted to make sure it was recorded officially :)

Much appreciated.

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