Rumors that Sonos may roll back their app....

Suspect it is just that, a rumor.  They would need to have three apps live, S1, S2 and New otherwise the new Ace headphones would not work.  I think they would be better spending the time and effort fixing the new app, which like it of not, is the future for them.  That is unless it is easy and cheap to re-instate the old S2 app.

There is no way in the world that will return. The forthcoming fixes are intended to sort any remaining music library issues, amongst other things. (I assume you have updated the app since the many music library functions were reinstated?)

The reinstatement of the previous app is also highly unlikely. The more sites quote other sites, the more the nuances of the click-bait first article by The Verge will end up becoming gospel and people will expect it to return. All those articles are doing is fuelling further disappointment...

Agreed, SMBv1 isn’t coming back and that’s a fine decision, good riddance to it.

I personally think the old app coming back would be the smartest decision Sonos could make in the last four months, I hope it happens.

I am lucky in being able to roll the Android app back (.apk file) and use Windows app, so at least I can 100% always see my speakers, select radio stations and set sleep timers. 

This is insane that they didn’t roll back to the old app like 3 weeks in?!?!  Why are they hanging on to this POS experience . . . until I searched online, I was like “well, that was a good run with sonos; all the speakers are bricks now so will need to figure out what to use next”.   

I used to be THE largest fan of sonos, refered them to friends all the time.  I tell everyone now “don’t buy, keep looking”

Any brand loyalty that’s left is waning by the hour.   Give it up, cut your losses on the bad foray with the crappy new app with terrible confusing experience and also, ah, doesn’t work.  And just get us back to something that plays music on remote speakers!!!!   Please!!!

I think whatever Sonos do next it has to have a significant impact on the people suffering stability issues they didn’t have before the new S2 app. We’re long past the point where features should be taking priority.

Apart from software checks on network settings, for the mix of library and online services I use, the 16.1 firmware and 16.1 app still work against the current cloud api without any problems.

Where Sonos have painted themselves into a challenging corner is the Ace and Roam 2? requiring the new S2 app. It’s technical challenges, so solvable, but how much work is needed to do it? 🤷

If they just promote the previous app and or firmware to be the latest version, those owners will suddenly have non-working products.

To try and separate into an S2/S3 or an S2 (classic) / S2 split they could add an extra version to the S1/S2 style version code in the firmware 16.1 and release a firmware based off that which won’t try and upgrade and the same for the old S2 app.

The New app could be updated to enable a switch to that firmware, like the S2 → S1.

Short term that would allow people who can see all their products to downgrade if they wanted to.

The longer term challenge then becomes what happens in the future. With S1/S2 it appears to me there was a clear separation of local vs online features. With the current S2 they’re both online-centric, so depending how the cloud api is written it may need work to have versioned endpoints if the S2 (classic) and latest app are to continue co-existing. There is likely to be significant push back if an attempt is made to force everyone using S2(classic) to the latest app at some point in the future, especially if it doesn’t add anything new they want.

There also needs to be a solution for the people who can’t get their devices to show in the app or successfully perform firmware updates.

As I say… all technical challenges, so solvable, but how much work would be needed I have no idea.

@controlav I can’t find the thread where we were talking about discovery, but this may be of interest to you. I was snapping all the various settings before starting to try and break things during upgrade. In the tools page on the devices with 16.1 firmware, there is an mDNS Announce button, which presumably would force an mDNS announcement for troubleshooting discovery.

I'm just glad I stayed on S1 and feel genuinely sorry for all those that have had their systems made unusable by this new app.

What amazes me is how they refuse to step back to the older working app after all this time.

They have severely damaged their brand.

I'm also intrigued as to why the headphones are not set up as a Zone Player, surely that would be the main selling point?.

At a guess it would have needed to be a balance between battery life, connectivity and processing power.

The Qualcomm chip which has all the bluetooth connectivity, apt codecs, dsp, even a usb interface has a limited amount of processing power and memory/storage.

To become a Zone player it may be as simple as the Qualcomm chip isn’t powerful enough to run the enough of the required software stack.

Adding another processor, memory, storage means more power required so either a bigger heavier battery or a shorter battery life.

At the moment there is little in the way of low power Wifi chipsets although Qualcomm are working on one.The wifi chip on board, to my knowledge, is used for the Soundbar link similar to wireless surrounds, so not extended always on, just for when linked to the soundbar.

While people already have expectations of what a Zone Player should do a fair amount of that is going to need sacrificing without impacting battery and potentially using wifi far more, which then impacts battery.

Steel series are one of the few companies who make dual bluetooth and wifi headsets, aimed at the gaming market where low latency matters. They generally come with two batteries that last 10 hours each. While workable in the gaming market, that sounds like a hard sell to an audio market. 20 hour battery life assuming you remember to charge both batteries and carry them with you 😁

SMB v1 needs to stay gone, Sonos took too much bad press, mostly clickbait but still harmful over having it.

Anyone not able to provide current versions of SMB from their NAS can easily and cheaply set up an SMB gateway that will provide v2 and v3 on pretty much any computer that runs SMB. I used a Pi Zero here to play with that, under $20 for the full kit. Not currently using it as using the Pi to provide the SMB share and host my music was so easy.

The closest official explanation of this was covered on Reddit, basically what @sigh posited above.

Could you share details please as all my CD’s are stored on my Media player (Popcorn hour) that supports only SMBv1 and works absolutely fine, as it has done since 2009.  It plays movies on TV and PC and music on PC and once upon a time music on Sonos.

From the developer of SMB https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/storage-at-microsoft/stop-using-smb1/ba-p/425858

I did this SMB v1 gateway to see if it would work, I used a Raspberry Pi but the same basic instructions should work on any computer.

SMB v1 Gateway  https://stan-miller.livejournal.com/357.html

Will give it a try. All I want to do is listen to my MP3/CD files on my Sonos’s as I have done for years and not get into the cost of a new NAS/configuration/setup and more devices consuming power !!!

Upload them to ibroadcast.com

I wish I could listen to my Sonos 5 but after multiple tries over multiple days I give up. My sonos 5 is going into the trash and it’s time to go back to Bluetooth speakers or wired passive speakers and vinyl. Nice to know I am not alone in this very frustrating experience. As a very experienced engineer and audiophile, it’s so frustrating when digital devises fail due to software issues. 

There are some serious security issues with SMBv1. That’s why drive manufacturers are no longer supporting it SONOS has stopped supporting it.

Note that SMBv1 drives are likely rather old and it would be a good idea to back them up. A couple months ago I was able to install an SMBv1 driver in W10 and backup a couple old drives.

Funny, my system is on 8.4 and my NAS with SMBv1 is working perfectly fine (yes, it’s backed up just in case).  So are my CR100s.  I wish I could update for some minor inconveniences but I don’t trust SONOS, they have repeatedly proved themselves untrustworthy.  And no, the batteries in my CR100s never exploded LOL

The SMBv1 drives are supporting S1 systems. When the drives ultimately fail, we’ll need to adjust things.

It’s not going to happen says the CEO Spence..

I’m hoping the wizards at Sonos intend to restore Sonos playlist and queue editing so my system will work as it did — from the time I bought my first play1 nearly a decade ago until it all came unglued on May 7.

I have access to my archived playlists using phonos plus; but I have just discovered that if I use ‘tunein’ to listen to internet radio in the sonos app, my queue is dumped, and I then have to reboot, deselect speakers, go back to phonos plus, pull up a playlist and then go back to the sonos app to select speakers to display the list I pulled up in phonos plus.

That’s a whole lot of hassle; so I’ve reverted to using another app to play local public radio stations through a bluetooth speaker.

I’m counting on Sonos to get this sorted out by Halloween. But that might just be wishful thinking.

The whole SMB v1 question falls foul of the usual ‘corporate’ security blindness. Yes it does allow for easy attacks, but, in the context of home use for serving music, whilst the potential for exploit is high, the actual risk is extremely low, as there’s no data of any value on an old NAS full of music files. 

As long as you make it really clear that you only keep music or video on anything using SMB1, then if someone wants to go to the trouble of intercepting your Sonos streaming, fill your boots. Use a dedicated ID/password for accessing it and then use iCloud Drive or OneDrive for more important stuff which should be secure. 

In a business scenario where an SMB1 share may hold customer data etc. it’s a very different risk profile. 

At home, if something works, people just like to keep using it, esp. in the music/video space. It wouldn’t take much effort to knock up a best practice guide to help people isolate their music/video files on an old NAS. 

I suspect just as many people though were impacted by loss of HTTP and the built in config Sonos created. However I don’t see why they could provide a wizard to help users share folders securely on a PC/Mac to help users out either… 

What people may store on a NAS drive is the concern and likely one of the reasons why smbv1 support is being disabled in the NAS drives.

There are other reasons, including the smbv1 code is far more complex in terms of client to server calls than smbv2/3, as well as smbv1 is unmaintained.

From a security perspective in the home environment, the issue isn’t that someone might intercept or use the Sonos device connection to the NAS. The issue is smbv1 security is accepted as broken and the malware and ransomware writers know this just as much as the people who maintain the file sharing code.

People are generally storing more than what they consider disposable content on a NAS, whether it’s backups, photos or other documents, anything they need to easily share between different computers, without using cloud storage or usb devices. Amateur/home based photographers, video creators an increasing number of home workers from different professions for example often deal with large files and cloud/network based storage isn’t practical. A nas may provide an easy place for them to keep files without relying on the local machine storage to hold everything. It doesn’t mean they should ignore backup practices, but in the real world with home or very small businesses that often only be a consideration after it is needed.

No modern NAS manufacturer will want to sell a product which is open season for malware that makes it into a users computer or sell with a big disclaimer stating “only store X types of files on our product”

Why? My 2015 bought WD NAS supports SMB 1, 2 and 3. While I am not even sure that I will spend on a replacement when it fails seeing how little I use NAS play now, do not the new drive have similar flexibility?

PS: and just via instinct, I do not have anything other than Sonos indexed music files on the NAS for years now. With my network connected Mac running the latest OS, I see regular updates for it and any sensitive files stored on it are Mac encrypted. I may still be exposed, but I don’t know of what else I can do.

The NAS has not received any update in years...

Maybe although some will likely have started removing it already with increasing numbers as the years go on. At some point the smbv1 code will stop being available in the latest samba/cifs code. It will be a few years yet, but there are already options added to the current releases so package maintainers, oems, device manufacturers can build the code without any smbv1 support.

Like you I stream most things these days and my Nas is primarily used on the rare occasions I have an internet outage. There are things on my Nas I listen to that aren’t available on any streaming service, so a small ssd drive plugged into a 3-5 W sbc would be enough for me.

Not everyone is in the same situation and some may prefer to keep their library local rather than relying on streaming for everything or even paying monthly fees because of the size of their library.