Restrict access to certain zones

Okay, so, as a teen who enjoys using Sonos at house parties, I think there is one feature that is sorely lacking from the Sonos system. I would imagine most people who have used Sonos at such a party will have also encountered this small, yet very annoying issue also.

PEOPLE CHANGE THE NOW PLAYING SONG - and it is so annoying. Being able to distribute controllers at a party is great, as people can then add music of their choice to the playlist, however, it is extremely annoying when the 'Now Playing' song changes repeatedly. Wouldn't it be great if some form of administrative rights could be put in place to only allow certain controllers (the party host) change the now playing song, and the rest just be contributors to the playlist. Or perhaps even just the option to set a password to change the now playing song? I think this would greatly increase the attractiveness of using Sonos during house parties. 🙂 This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled How to improve a Sonos house party....

sonos we need an answer for this!

All I want is to be able to lock down zones to approved devices. If non approved devices try and control certain zones they should be asked for a pin code or passcode.

how is this 3 year old idea not getting addressed??? I was sold on Sonos as a mature superior software product yet this is as basic as it gets?? Some sort of master admin control, user profiles granting zones and privilege control levels. Also where is the user profile for content control, multiple accounts for the same service, etc... Sonos seems to be ignoring the most basic features??

I'd be in favor of SONOS adding a new app called "SONOS Pro" that's a paid app.  For $5 or even $10 a pop, SONOS could satisfy hundreds of SONOS users and help offset the software development costs too. 

The average user who just have one or two zones and doesn't need parental or user control or zone-based restrictions could still use the free app from the iTunes or Play Store, etc.  But for the rest of us that want more control, the "Sonos Pro" app could be purchased.  Once a system is tagged with having been configured with the "pro" app, then it would require each any mobile client that wants to touch/control it to use the same "pro" app.  A master admin acct could permit kids to only control a single zone such as their own bedroom; but give them no control over the family room, outdoor, and theater zones, etc.
You are missing something.

Some of us users have 9 or more zones using 11 or more SONOS speakers/connect/amps.  People have our wifi password because we are MORE than happy to share the household wifi.

We have children who have their own SONOS in their rooms, but we aren't about to set up a completely separate wifi household for their one speaker. 

What we are asking of SONOS is to have a similar capability to that of iTunes where you can grant "access" to some people to do things like vote for songs, request other songs, but not change the volume, skip songs, stop songs, etc.

That's one of the requests here.  The other is that we be able to stop our children (or guests) from accessing components of the network such as the SONOS in the baby's room, or parents room, or the main living area, and only give them access to their own rooms.

Guided Access is not suitable for this, and nor should it be used as a workaround.  This is a simple request that SONOS really needs to start taking seriously.

There have been several types of requests for restrictions (party mode, zones, volume, etc).  No additional info from Sonos but they will never comment on future plans.  Never do.

Another update to Sonos and still they can't grasp the idea of basic security! Just this thread alone is 3 years old - I think they don't actually understand why people keep on asking for this feature!

I just can't believe this is not adressed, I've been rooting for this for years, it must be 3 days of programming, tops.

The least they could do is explain WHY this is not adressed.

No there are no restrictions on zones. It has never been announced as an upcoming feature either.

So we are going on 5 years now and we still dont have any way to restrict or password protect the system. I know the SONOS team reads the threads i guess they dont care about their customers needs/wants ? Can we get any kind of update? is this something that you are even looking into ? or can you please just tell us that it's something you are not planning on implementing so we can stop hoping and wishing for it?

Or you could stick to radio silence, that always works...

I agree 100% on the above. For a company that has been around as long as you have you'd think you would listen more to its consumers. This would greatly increase the usability of this product if you could lock it down to just certain accounts or certain passcodes that allowed full access or limited access..

Surely the whole point is to DECREASE the usability?

Decrease the usability for unauthorized access....YES!

It's now 5 years later and this is STILL not a feature... That's just sad...

I have a seperate VLAN and SSID set up for my sonos, this is all great and dandy. However, I have 5 different rooms with sonos speakers and multiple tablets mounted in-wall throughout house. I would love to have the capability to limit some tablets to only control certain speakers. For example, I want the tablet in pool house to only control speakers by pool and in pool house. I want the kid's game room tablet to only control the speakers in the game room. I also want the tablet in the main living room to be able to cast and control all of the speakers. The idea of creating seperate wifi networks for each speaker zone is stupid. This means you can't have a master controller that can control all zones if each zone is on it's own network. This doesn't really seem that hard to implement. I don't like the fact that people in the pool house can accidentally change song in the main house and the volume there as well. I don't like the fact that the kids can change the volume in the kitchen and living room when they are in the game room. However, I still want to have the capability to control the speakers outside by the pool from the tablet in the main house without having to join a whole new wifi network everytime i want to change a zone.

Even at my work we have a sonos system for use in all of the areas we work in, but in the employee lounge they might want to listen to something different. So I have a tablet in there mounted in the wall where people can choose what to listen to in there. Unfortunately, they accidentally control volume or music in other zones. It'd be nice to be able to lock this controller down to ONLY be able to control the employee's speaker while also still maintaining the ability for the main controller in the supervisor's office to also control the speaker in the employee room.

Why is this STILL not a feature? What does sonos suggest to solve this problem?

Cross-posting onto multiple threads isn't really going to help.
Based on your comments on the other thread, I think you should explore dividing your Sonos into two (or more) separate systems/households.

I'm not sure how this is cross posting. If you believe these threads are duplicate and should be merged, then sure, have them merged. I am not a mod, nor have control on either of the threads.

I am a little curious, what brings you to have such a strong opinion against this feature? I can see why not everyone uses every feature, but all we are talking about here are optional features, where the user can opt-in/out.

Also, your suggestion is not a solution. Here's a quick overview of a common situation (quote from a user who posted earlier in this thread):


I have 5 different rooms with sonos speakers and multiple tablets mounted in-wall throughout house. I would love to have the capability to limit some tablets to only control certain speakers.
For example, I want the tablet in pool house to only control speakers by pool and in pool house. I also want the tablet in the main living room to be able to cast and control all of the speakers.

The idea of creating seperate wifi networks for each speaker zone is stupid. This means you can't have a master controller that can control all zones if each zone is on it's own network.
I don't like the fact that the kids can accidentally change the volume in the kitchen and living room when they are in the game room. However, I still want to have the capability to control the speakers outside by the pool from the tablet in the main house without having to join a whole new wifi network every time i want to change a zone. [...]

I would be open to any alternative solutions that can restrict the zones to control. But a separate network does not solve it.

I really don't think a separate network is what people are looking for.To reinforce the point: it's not a separate network. You'd simply be setting up more than one Sonos system on the same network.
Got it. Never realized we could install multiple Sonos systems on the same network.
Anyway, multiple systems or networks would defeat the main purpose I use Sonos for: multi-room audio.

I would be surprised if either solution would take more than a few hours of development time.

Oh, I thought this was a serious discussion. The moment I see the "it's surely only a few lines of code" argument I tend to check out.
Point taken. This wasn't meant to be taken literally, I shouldn't have mentioned a time-unit.
More of a thought that a lot of the existing architecture could probably be re-used. There's of course a lot of different ways to implement something like that, I'm not sure which one Sonos would chose. A couple thoughts that come to mind:
1) if each zone is PIN-based, Sonos could implement the feature similarly to the PIN-protection of the max volume they introduced in October 2018.
2) if the Sonos access becomes account based, it may require more development resources. But might lead to a better user interface.
Each user could chose to use to use the app without logging in (as it is currently), or log in with his sonos.com account.
Each Sonos System would have an owner. The owner can give rights to each user/group separately. Rights such as
- guests user can control the living room. Useful to anyone that has the WiFi password. No risk of waking up the baby
- user1@myemail.com can control the kids bedroom. This could be useful for a wall-mounted tablet in the kids bedroom.
- user2@myemail.com can control the whole house. Useful for the parents.
The user account credentials can be saved by the Sonos app to avoid the need to login more than once.
The same user account could be used on different Sonos Systems/networks.

Solution 2) would definitely require a lot more development resources. This is probably what you were thinking.
One nice thing is that it could also pave the way for future features, such as remote-management (which is off topic for this thread)

Have a pair of play 3's outside. Everyone in house uses it. Want to get a play 5 for my room. Yet don't want the roomates to have access to it so they can't blast "Who let the dogs out" at 5am while I'm sleeping.

Anything to be done? This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled Password on different zones?.