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I don’t know that the way S2 handles room selection is ideal. (The following is all based on having S2 set to ask me what speakers/rooms to play on after “a while.”)

When I select something to play, the speaker/room selection card pops up and asks where I want to start playing my selection. I have a Play:1 in the kitchen and a pair of Play:5s + Sub in our living room, all grouped as my “Main Floor” and another pair set up as my “Upstairs.” If I was previously listening to music using Main Floor, the card still has those 2 speaker sets individually selected, but it does not seem to remember that those 2 speakers are also a group. (Main Floor shows as unselected.)

Things are further compounded if I go to select Upstairs. It simply adds my upstairs pair to the 2 “ungrouped” speakers that were previously playing. On top of that, if I truly did want to play music across all 4 speaker sets, that would actually be my entire Sonos set-up (thus, “Everywhere”) except Everywhere does not get activated.

I feel like S2 should know when you select all of the speakers of one group and should override the individual speaker selection with the defined grouping. Grouping literally lives above the individual speakers which would denote that it takes precedence over selecting individual speakers. 


While I’m not crazy about having to deselect the group that was previously selected to play music “after a while,” I get that that’s probably (marginally) more intuitive than if selecting a new group deactivated the last played group. (Honestly, if that group/speaker selection is going to pop up “after a while” it’s really asking, “Hey, where do you want to play music?” and should start cleared. That we can now group rooms and speakers has reduced the number of taps for some configurations, so the need to remember is likely less important. But I know that isn’t how it has historically worked, so I don’t expect that change to get made.)

A couple of things you can perhaps choose to look at in the S2 App…

  • You can create local controller groups/profiles to assist in selection and deselection of Sonos rooms and/or custom groups. See ‘Settings/System/Groups’. Those groups you choose to create are available from any sonos room on the ‘system’ tab.
  • The so called ‘selection card’ pops up after 15 minutes of inactivity on all sonos rooms. You can (optionally) switch off that feature in ‘Settings/App Preferences’ the toggle switch is called ‘Confirm Location’. If you do switch off the card, then you may find it easier to use the custom local controller groups that you create, via the ‘system tab’ rooms. 

Hope that assists.

Hi Ken!

I had hoped that my initial post would have suggested that I am quite familiar with how the S2 controller app works, and that I have indeed already figured out how to create groups and assign speakers/rooms to them. I guess I was wrong! I am also aware of and understand how the Confirm Location setting works. I wasn’t asking a question about either of these nor am I confused about how they currently work. I am simply suggesting that perhaps better/smarter functionality regarding these two features might be possible.

Thank you for making sure that I understand how the app works!

eric.domond,

I guess it’s ‘six of one’ and ‘half a dozen of the other’, and all depends on what the next user-action is going to be in the App.

If the plan is to play to the last (same) group and the so called ‘selection card’ is switched off, its just a case of playing the chosen audio and it will play to that previous group of rooms .. it’s extremely simple if the plan is also to play the same playlist, as it can all be done with one click of the play button. 
 

I would not personally want to recreate a group of rooms to play to, everytime I opened the App after a certain period of inactivity.

 

If the intention is however to switch rooms/groups, then the user could perhaps leave the ‘selection card’ activated ...and then coupled with the pre-created custom groups, ‘deselect’ the current group with one ‘click’ and select the chosen new group with a second ‘click’ and they are ready to go again and play whatever they want to another part of their household.

 

I think the current S2 App options are fairly simple for the majority of things that people may choose to do, as long as the custom groups are put in place for regularly chosen room groupings in the household.

 

I guess though, that some features that users find helpful, can sometimes go against how another user chooses to use their App ...but we all know that you can’t always please everyone. 

And I can understand that.

Even if I were to disable Confirm Location and add that extra tap (to bring up the selection card and select speakers/groups), I still think that “Everywhere” should override everything. It is an absolute selection. “Everywhere” means literally everywhere.

 

This screenshot I’ve attached shouldn’t be possible because it doesn’t make sense. I’m not saying “Everywhere… oh, and Upstairs.” I’m saying Everywhere.

In that screenshot, you have both ‘Upstairs’ and ‘Everywhere’ selected… perhaps think of ‘Everywhere’ as overriding every other group…

 

So, if you were to deselect ‘Everywhere’ in the example shown ...it will then leave you with just the ‘Upstairs’ Group of rooms selected.

 

The group (buttons) switch each group ‘on’and ‘off‘ like a toggle switch .. but ‘Everywhere’ is the overriding group and actually is the one group that is already setup in the App by default and cannot be deleted like the other groups.

 

Dunno if that helps you to see how the local controller groups currently work… The way they are setup, also makes it very easy to switch any playing audio between the various groups too, without having to stop the audio.

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