Loss of the iPod dock

Since Sonos discontinued support for the iPod dock I have been struggling to adapt to how cumbersome it has become to play music from my iTunes library. It was a classic iPod so no digital link was possible, but it was easy to shuffle my music or play from my playlists. I have since added the 7000 songs to the music library on my sonos desktop controller but of course it wont play from my iPhone unless I connect to the desktop, which is also a burden.


I'm not following that last statement. Technically, you can't put a music library on the Sonos controller. You can tell Sonos where your local music files are stored and it will index that for later playback. That information is not stored on the controller though, it's on the Sonos speakers themselves.

Regarding your iPhone, you can maintain a second copy of the music files directly on your phone, or use a music streaming service that allows you to upload your own tracks. That use to be Amazon, but they do not support that anymore.

I moved everything I owned to the cloud several years back. I don't feel like I can control tags as well since then, but it was worth it to be able to access the same music on all devices no matter where I am.


Also in downloading the music library I have lost all of my playlists that were on my library, so what was relatively easy before has now become an issue. The library seems to have been added to the queue, making it impossible to flick between artists and playlists and most of the night the music crashes. It’s all become very frustrating. I have 5 speakers Play 1, 3 x Play 3’s but none of them able to connect through airdrop. As far as I can see, the only hope of having the flexibility is buy a new iPod or a Smart Play 1 with Alexa. Anyone help? I’m so frustrated by this.

What does a new iPod get you? A Sonos One is also not going to help you since you will not be able to access your local library through voice control and would not help playing music on your iPhone in any way. Rumor is that you'll soon be able to access Apple music services through Alexa, but that is the streaming service, not your local files.

Danny, thank you so much for taking time to respond to me. I’m not sure I’m as technically minded as I might suggest. I have added my music library to Sonos on my PC. Now on my iPhone controller and IPad controller when I select music library, the playlists that were on my old analogue ipod are no longer there. I assume this might be a copying over issue? I’m not sure. When we used the ipod it was easy to shuffle music or select artists, or playlists where as now doing this seems a challenge and it wants to add everything to the queue, which is already burgeoning.
The main question is about making access to the music library easy, if it is not working on Sonos should I revert to using a digital ipod to give me back the flexibility that I miss. Or should I try to reload the library and disconnect the queue to stop it overloading? Apologies if this doesn’t help you understand my issue.