Same experience, same thoughts! Merry Xmas

Sonos thought they were pulling the wool over the world's eyes when they put out a statement saying they had made all of the repairs earlier than expected. That everything is working well and they plan to now embark on a new beginning to re-establish the brands reputation. The board and CEO should resign. 

No more sonos ever. The company is sucks. 

Seems I’m on the other side of the fence as the Sonos App does seem to be fixed for my Home setup. Did you call Sonos Support?

I did.  Waited on hold for 69 min. Got someone, began my tale of woes, call got dropped.  

Ken:

 what happens when you load one of your M3U playlists Into the queue?  Make sure it’s a playlist of 300 tracks or more.

Probably hung up on you..

I was being polite.  My app just can't seem to find my move. Everything else seems okay.

Not sure why you’re asking, but I see the same/similar as some other users in the community have already reported @MoPac, it loads repeatedly, until the queue limit is reached, but in my case the playlist still plays okay - I have reported it to Sonos, they were aware already. Just waiting for the fix, I guess.

A workaround for those that use iOS controllers and can’t get their local .m3u library playlists to play is to import the playlist into a ‘player App’, like MusicStreamer for example. After indexing the local library, it can be used to AirPlay the playlist to Sonos speakers. That works fine. (See screenshot attached - playing my ‘All Local Library.m3u’ playlist via MusicStreamer App).

I did try recently go onto convert some local playlists to .m3u8 (MAC variant) format to see if they might load okay in Sonos, but I didn’t get success with that, but have not given up on it and will let you know if I can get that format to work.

​@Ken_Griffiths 

The duplication issue does show that the app still needs work.  So for some it doesn’t quite do what they want it to.  I personally miss the better queue management of the “orange” app.  Also the queue does not follow the music progress.  And last where is the local library album art in the queue (IOS).  So for me the app is not quite ready yet.

The M3U duplication issue can be avoided by using SonoPhone/Pad, Sonos PC or Phonos Universal.  The queue will not duplicate using those apps.

For you and many others the 80.x app is adequate.  Just not quite there for me…. Yet.

I didn’t say the new App was doing the things you mention ​@MoPac in fact those things are still on the ‘to do’ list as Sonos have mentioned and they’re looking at the A-Z searching of local libraries too. 

The ‘new’ issue with .m3u playlists is quite obviously  a bug that has crept into the App and needs fixing, as some users may already realise.

The queue management and the saving/naming of Sonos playlists etc. is also on their to-do list aswell.

I haven’t mentioned that things are not still progressing with the new App. We all know that Sonos has more to do.  Sonos acknowledged that on December 10th.

The App progress reports/updates from Nick Millington at Sonos do outline where Sonos are with many of these things …and mentions some other things besides, particularly in relation to the App development and testing for those with impaired vision.

I get that further things need improving. BUT the basic operation of the App seems to be flawed as far as I can tell. If I open the app, at any given time there’s about a 20% chance that it will work at all - just basic stuff like starting / stopping music, changing volume or rooms - quite apart from the lacking features. It need reworking from the start in my opinion, starting with making it load quicker, work quicker - just work fundamentally. 

Yes, it’s been spoken about previously online, some users have reported latency issues and Sonos have acknowledged them. I’m not entirely sure it’s the case for the majority, but it seems to affect those further away from AWS online cloud servers who may see slower response times.

I don’t personally see the new App start-up issues you mention, as the attached shows (and that’s with over 20+ products and a good many music services installed), but I do encounter some latency when playing/shuffling albums & playlists from some streaming services, like Amazon Music, for example. Sonos have acknowledged the latency in these areas and are apparently looking to improve those things - again that’s mentioned in Nick Millington’s updates.

Ok so possibly distance from servers then? I was thinking it’s because I don’t have the bandwidth - am down a private road with no chance of fibre any time soon so was considering getting Starlink - having said that the Sonos app will fail to work when I can easily stream video on the TV so doesn’t really make sense. We are quite rural so perhaps this is an issue…

I wouldn’t think the start-up of the App would be entirely related, but that’s just a bit of a guess on my part, but maybe it’s having trouble ‘discovering’ your Sonos devices around the Home… it’s one reason I prefer to use a WiFi mesh setup and not use SonosNet as a majority (not all) of my Sonos devices use the faster 5Ghz WiFi band and I do ensure their WiFi connection in the Sonos App is showing 45dB or higher as touched upon in this support link:

https://support.sonos.com/en-us/article/understanding-the-network-details-section-in-the-sonos-app

I also choose to reserve the Sonos IP addresses too so that everything stays static.

I guess if it’s a music service that is slow to load though, that might be part of your issue - you can test that in the App perhaps by searching each music service tab individually and see which ones are perhaps slow to respond and populate their results and then see what happens if you remove it temporarily from the App.

Already have a WiFi mesh. I’m not sure how to reserve IP addresses? 
It’s not the music service. I can start a playlist or album directly from Spotify and it works straight away but then if I go into the Sonos app to edit it, change volume etc, then the App will take forever to load, volume control won’t work etc. Eventually a few minutes later the app catches up and starts working. 
You can see when it’s lagging because the current music in each room isn’t loading and the music services tab doesn’t load. This was never an issue with the previous version of the App so I don’t think my wireless setup is the issue - almost never had any issues before the new version of the App. 

Thanks Ken, but unfortunately that's not the issue. It lags in every way, 30 + seconds to locate my system if at all, volume up/down lag varies from 0 to no response at all, streaming erratic, room selection so bad it will not change streams. Pressing stop or play invariably has no effect until you turn off/on. Reconnecting has no impact. All very very very frustrating.

Maybe see if your devices are using the faster 5Ghz band and checkout their SNR levels in the Sonos App too. These Sonos products support a 5Ghz WiFi connection…

• Play:1
• Play:3
• Play:5 (Gen 2)
• Sub (Gen 1)
• Sub (Gen 2)
• Era 100
• Era 300
• Move 2
• Roam
• Roam 2
• Roam SL
• Five
• Move
• One (Gen 1)
• One (Gen 2)
• One SL
• Port
• Arc Ultra
• Sub (Gen 3 & 4)
• Sub Mini
• SYMFONISK Bookshelf (Gen 2)
• SYMFONISK Floor lamp
• SYMFONISK Picture frame
• SYMFONISK Table lamp (Gen 2)
• SYMFONISK Bookshelf (Gen 1)

It’s also helpful to have the routers 2.4Ghz WiFi band using a ‘fixed’ non-overlapping channel 1, 6, or 11 and if the router allows, set that bands channel-width to 20Mhz only.

My experience is similar to HamonWry2 above. Although there may be some issue relating to IP addresses etc it was never a problem before so I do think it’s the App and not my setup. 
About 20% of the time the initial message says there isn’t even a system on my WiFi network at all - again this never used to happen.  I’ll go back and check WiFi bands - I think I’ve got both available (2.4 and 5) but I may have fiddled with that in the past in order to get more penetration in the house due to an annoying L shaped house with very thick walls. 

Also another strange thing (not sure if it’s just me) - the sleep timer returned a few weeks back (still waiting for playlist editing to return) but sometimes it disappears in the App, then a few minutes later is back again. 

I’m not seeing the issues you mention ​@HamonWry2 - maybe video/screen-capture the issue and discuss it with Sonos Support Staff (if you’ve perhaps not done that already). Here is a link to contact them:

https://support.sonos.com/s/contact

Volume control, standalone, or grouped ‘rooms’ has been fine here, but I have seen others mention the issue. Admittedly, I thought Sonos had fixed the matter a while ago with one of their updates, but maybe it’s not fixed for some users? I’d see what Sonos say about it.

Interestingly I just went to the online help bot and it advised me to wait for the next update! 

I found these comments about Sonos volume control on Reddit dating back from last September - see attached. I’ve not experienced the issue, as stated, but I’m fairly sure Sonos did roll out a fix for it. Maybe check back through the update release notes - HERE

Interesting but looks like that relates to Android. 

I think the interesting comment from Sonos in that Reddit post, is that volume control has no bearing on the cloud connection, it’s all local-network related - that infers to me it’s ‘perhaps’ some latency/communication issue over the LAN, between controller and/or speakers, rather than it being WAN related.

So putting Sonos devices onto the 5Ghz WiFi band will likely help (where possible) and setting the 2.4Ghz WiFi band to use a 20Mhz channel-width, non-overlapping channel (1, 6, or 11) may also help to reduce any interference issues too and hopefully improve those things.