Does anyone know if it's possible for two users in the same household to login into a single account and control their music separately? Thanks Moderator note: We updated this article in October 2023 with new information below.Her you can find additional information regarding this: Use multiple accounts for the same music service

Multiple users on a single account

Yes?

I'm not sure I really understand your question. Generally speaking, there's one Sonos system set up in a LAN (home). But each speaker can be controlled by all controllers connected to the LAN. If you have two or more speakers connected, any of the controllers can control any / all of those speakers (rooms).

Thanks for the reply. What I mean is, it looms.like Sonos is a system designes for multiple rooms for a sungle user. What I'd like is the ability for me to uae the app to control my music in one room and my wife use the app under the same login (account/subscription). Hope thats clearer. Is that possible? Thanks

Just to be clear, my wife shoukd be able to use the same account to pay her music in a different room but she had complete control via the app of her stuff and I have control of mine. Thanks

You can have multiple controllers with multiple rooms. All controllers can control all rooms. If you have different streaming accounts they can both be added and controllers set to default to a particular streaming account. Only one Sonos account is needed but several peaple can use the system simultaneously.

Perhaps the difficulty here is in knowing exactly what you mean by 'her music' and 'my music'. If you clarify that, we might be able to be more precise in our answers.

I'm guessing it's the same as my problem. I want our controllers to be independent so when I play music in the kitchen, I only see what I last played there, even though my wife has played music since.

It's annoying if I'm part-way through an album and come home to find she's played Gloria Estifan in the afternoon and I have to load my album again and remember the place I was at.

I understand each controller would need to be aware of other controllers but surely it's not beyond the wit of the software engineers to notify a user that the speaker is in use by another controller if they try and play something.

Hi. It is not a question of whether the engineers could do it. It is a question of whether it would be a good idea. And in my opinion it would completely undermine a fundamental element of the Sonos design. It is multiroom, multisource and multi-controller. The app is just a controller. All the software is on the speakers, and controllers just give a 'view' of what is there and must be kept in line with each other.

I understand your particular frustration but your request will never happen, can never happen and must never happen!

I agree. If I want to play music in a room and can't because the last person using that room has it locked or is playing something and has one out it would ruin the whole Sonos ethos. The fact that all of my family can play anything they want in any room is brilliant.

The critical point here is that the app is not a music player. It is a means of viewing the system and issuing commands to it. The system has to remain agnostic about where a command has come from in a multi-controller environment like Sonos. Every controller must give the same picture of the system.

The suggestion from @cobraBLACK also sits uneasily with the notion of the queue. (Although I have to admit to hating the way the queue works now!)

Doesn't AirPlay 2 provide a way to solve this?

If all your Sonos are newer and support AirPlay/AirPlay 2, and you use native apps on your iPhone or other AirPlay 2 client, then your client device will be able to continue from where it left off.

Of course, you aren't using the Sonos app, that's a positive in many cases 🙂 and your client device will be actively streaming (can't be shut off as it it both a controller and a source), but would give you the experience you want otherwise?

So here is my problem. My wife and I have separate amazon music accounts with separate playlists. My account is tied to the Sonos system so she is unable to link her amazon music account and play her playlists. Is there anyway to have multiple amazon music accounts so we can each play our own playlists at different times??

Sure, just add her Amazon account using the Sonos app. In the app itself there is a clunky UI to switch between your account and hers. You play your stuff, she plays here, no problem.

If you use Alexa then this might be a problem, I am not aware of how to get the official Sonos skill to handle this case, but could be wrong. I use my own thing on Alexa.

The critical point here is that the app is not a music player. It is a means of viewing the system and issuing commands to it. The system has to remain agnostic about where a command has come from in a multi-controller environment like Sonos. Every controller must give the same picture of the system.

The suggestion from @cobraBLACK also sits uneasily with the notion of the queue. (Although I have to admit to hating the way the queue works now!)

You are completly wrong, the app is a music player for shure. A severly limited one is multiuser

Laugh.

John is 100% correct. This is why you can start a playback using your phone, then leave your home, and the stream continues to play.

The middle point is when you’re playing “from this device” on an Android phone, since it no longer works on an iOS device. In that case, the Android device is acting as an NAS style source for the data, but the player itself is still on the speakers, which are reaching out to get the stream from where they are told it is. There is never any music playing by the app on the phone.

Laugh.

John is 100% correct. This is why you can start a playback using your phone, then leave your home, and the stream continues to play.

You have completly missed the consept and your example is non relevant.

If you are home or not, or if the stream goes directly from source to speaker, or relayed or act as a remote is not relevant att all.

The fact is you need to use the app to initialize playing of radio channels added as source to the speaker, there are no other way to start this if you dont want to use thirdparty apps for this, as long as this is the fact, the sonos app is a music player

I just got 2 one gen 2 speakers and to be honest my first impression with multiuser and user isolation in regards to privacy in sonos make me think this is a pile of nonsense

Moderator edit, to conform with community guidelines for posting.

I just got 2 one gen 2 speakers and to be honest my first impression with multiuser and user isolation in regards to privacy in sonos make me think this is a pile of .nonsense

Delightful words. This is a community forum and we are trying to explain how the system works. If you get the concept you will realise just how flexible the Sonos system is.

Anyone on your lan with the Sonos app (or Spotify, Amazon music, Alexa, Airplay2, Google home) can play music in any room. They can add to queue, or even delete items. The Sonos app just fires a command to the speaker to play music from a particular source. If you use Alexa it fires the same command direct to the speaker. Group speakers together and it will play to all of them in sync.

This concept is what made Sonos unique when it launched and is still one of the few systems to offer this flexibility

That pile of **** is something much loved by users.

This system has multiple flaws:

System is tied to a user account, its in fact a single user system.
Its not possible for a second user to add spotify directly to the system without logging in to the system owners account
Its not possible for the system owner to add spotify to the system for user two if system owner ront have a spotify account.
Privacy is non existent, its possible for system owner to interact with spotify accounts added to the system that is belonging to a different user.
Sonos speakers is sending hughe amount of data to their own system and to google.and amazon. Blocking outgoing traffic from speaker to spotify, or any service that is non source of the streaming music makes the speaker useless.
No information about thirdparty integration and whats data is collected.

In my view the reason sonos is loved is its simpel for stupid people, much like apple, it just works even if you sold your soul for it. For advamced users sonos is garbage. Why does sonos stick with 802.11g? Its a extremely old protocol and should have been replaced 10 years ago.

But the worst is ofcourse multiuser setup and complete.lack of privacy and no gdpr compliance.

Lovely comments

This sonos is just utterly .crap. after using it for some days the list of issues with this system is pretty long, so long that all my speakers is going straight back to sonos, is just to poorly done for my taste.

I recommend spotify to realy look into privacy, this system is in my view a hugh problem and in direct conflict with gdpr.

Also, multiuser is non existent. What the heck is sonos thinking when two spotify useraccounts is added to same sonos, other users have access to private listings, and is in fact possible for anybody to use someone elses spotifyaccount. Iam truly shocked what kind of lazy approach sonos is taking.

I am pretty relaxed about my wife using my playlists. There's privacy and then there is paranoia.

Yes for shure me to, but the problem to this approach is that i need to login with the sonos system owner account on the individual users phones and then add their spotify account to the system. Again what the heck, a system owners account should ONLY be used on the owners devices not on anyone elses phones.

And when two or more users have the sonos app, why is it so that changes made in one app reflects to all other userapps? Adding/removing radiochannels, privacy and datagathering settings should be specific to each user not same on all.

As i said, this system is so half finished and poorly designed that i belive sonos is francly .****.

On the positiv side, sonos is well designed visualy and sounds good, very bad the quality is not maintained on the software s

If you don’t like the way Sonos works sell it and move on? Why insult those who like the way it works and the whole design, which is constantly evolving to cater for the changing way people are listening to music. As soon as you resort to insulting those you don’t agree with you have just lost the debate.

Expletives with prior punctuation to fool the profanity filter just childish too.

Funny how you don't seem to grasp the philosophy and functionality of Sonos, and then blame others that they don't, meanwhile accusing Sonos of doing a bad job.

Sonos is a multiroom system designed for multiple users jointly in a home. As such, the system belongs to the home in a communal sense, not to a single user. I trust that the implementations by Denon, Bose and Bluesound work in a very similar way. Google's smarthome uses the same premise; a user that is "invited" into the home can see and manipulate everything in it. I'm pretty sure that all of these companies will have GDPR covered one way or another. But of course your view on such features is right and all of these multi-billion dollar companies are wrong.

By the way, as far as I know, GDPR is about what companies do with your data. I doubt GDPR applies when you are voluntarily adding your Spotify account to a system that will show your playlists to other users - I would think that is all very well possible, without Sonos or Spotify ever violating their GDPR obligations. If I add a Nest camera to my Google Home, and also grant my wife access to that system, do I then have the right to complain that she can see the footage from "my" camera, when that is the whole point of the system?

All in all, given your criticisms, it sounds that Sonos apparently is not for you, and also you didn't really research how the system works before you bought it. You then chose to vent your anger about that here. You're not the first and you will not be the last, but it doesn't make you right and everyone else, including Sonos, wrong.

If you want to use a speaker without anyone seeing your data, wire one to your phone

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