The Sonos Brexit and pragmatic ways past it - ADVANCED APPROACHES
A little over a week ago, I started a thread to engage with like minded people here: those that felt the way I did, as explained in my opening post there. That thread was titled: “The Sonos Brexit and pragmatic ways past it” and I intended that to be the last thread I open on this site.
That thread has grown beyond expectations. While everyone on it has contributed to keep it profanity free and largely rant free, with an occasional nudge by @Edward R in that effort, just by virtue of its length, it has become unwieldy as all long threads become. And it has many days to run, because the Sonos Brexit event, and the release of detailed information about it by Sonos, are both at least three months away.
I therefore thought that it made sense to break my promise to myself - No More Threads - and make just this one exception to it, by opening this thread. It is meant to discuss such approaches and options that may be employed by advanced users that are comfortable going well beyond plug and play options in pursuit of ways past this Sonos Brexit with or without incorporating any Sonos product in it. The original thread linked above may then be used for options that probably a majority of Sonos users will be able to employ - the plug and play kind of options towards the same objective. Which are those that employ off the shelf third party devices that are self contained, such as Echo Dots as an example, where the only wiring, if needed, is external - a stereo wire running between Sonos and non Sonos devices. And which do not involve any coding or any attempt to get under the Sonos hood. Or which involve server like devices that need a complex set up to get it to work with Sonos. In brief, something that non geeks - and I am one of those - will be able to cope with, belong to the original thread, while the complex options belong to this thread, as its title suggests.
There is no set in stone dividing line between the two approaches and none is needed. I am sure that community judgement can be relied on to keep the two threads distinct, linked by a common ethos, in a way that both end up being more useful than one thread will be.
I will visit this thread, but here I do not expect to further any discussion forward significantly - that will be beyond my abilities. So, lurking mode here, most if not all of the time. And if I find anything useful here that makes sense to the original thread, I will steal with no compunctions!
So, well before Sonos forks out legacy and modern systems into two, a fork to serve all that will be effected by the Sonos fork.
I apologies for the clunky title, which is an outcome of the original thread being blessed with a clunky one.
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And now my posts here are getting red flagged for moderation….
A technical question in it by the way, not even a whiff of being a rant.
That’s happened to me in the past a fair number of times when I’ve had a large quote history included with lots of interjection etc… sometimes also when I edit quickly in succession as well. May well just be the spam filter getting tripped for some reason.
I will try resending:
I have a Echo Show 5 wired to Line in Jacks of a Connect Amp; and it shows artwork for all music played from Amazon and Apple Music. In my NAS, all my CDs are ripped in folders, that also has the album art as a folder.jpg named jpeg. Plus there are iTunes downloads where the album art is embedded into every track’s data. When I play from the NAS via Sonos, I can see album art for both on my Sonos controller apps. Does anyone know a way for the Echo Show to first access or be supplied music from the NAS, and will it then show album art? Even if that way involves kit with open circuitboards - as long as I don't have to use a soldering iron:-).
In the past, mine have usually been lost in the void - perfectly acceptable ones.
It happens sometimes. The filter doesn’t make any decisions based on users and automatically flags content based on past spam posts. I’ve restored yours already.
@Ryan S : Thanks for the prompt action.
I have a Echo Show 5 wired to Line in Jacks of a Connect Amp; and it shows artwork for all music played from Amazon and Apple Music.
In my NAS, all my CDs are ripped in folders, that also has the album art as a folder.jpg named jpeg. Plus there are iTunes downloads where the album art is embedded into every track’s data. When I play from the NAS via Sonos, I can see album art for both on my Sonos controller apps.
Does anyone know a way for the Echo Show to first access or be supplied music from the NAS, and will it then show album art? Even if that way involves kit with open circuitboards - as long as I don't have to use a soldering iron:-).
The MyMedia for Alexa skill will access your NAS. You need to run a small support program on your network somewhere to index the files.
I have a Echo Show 5 wired to Line in Jacks of a Connect Amp; and it shows artwork for all music played from Amazon and Apple Music. In my NAS, all my CDs are ripped in folders, that also has the album art as a folder.jpg named jpeg. Plus there are iTunes downloads where the album art is embedded into every track’s data. When I play from the NAS via Sonos, I can see album art for both on my Sonos controller apps. Does anyone know a way for the Echo Show to first access or be supplied music from the NAS, and will it then show album art? Even if that way involves kit with open circuitboards - as long as I don't have to use a soldering iron:-).
I replied but the post got red-flagged …. grrrrrr.
@castalla Question re my mediaalexa - if the music is on a NAS, and I don't want my computer to be serving the music, how do I use this?
If yes, will it show artwork on Show while streaming from the NAS?
@castalla Question re my mediaalexa - if the music is on a NAS, and I don't want my computer to be serving the music, how do I use this?
If yes, will it show artwork on Show while streaming from the NAS?
Not sure I understand …
You have to run a small mymedia program on a PC, Pi, or some NAS (which have Docker). This will index your music files. It also acts as a dashboard to mymedia:
I’ll take a photo of the echo playing an album and post here later.
@castalla : you have to remember that you are talking someone only superficially knowing these things! What is the meaning of a NAS having Docker? If it has one, can the my media program sit on and operate on the NAS contents?
What if the NAS does not have Docker, whatever that is, but the music files are on the NAS? Where will the my media program then sit?
Okay - I don’t understand Docker use myself so I can’t be much help!
The easiest way to try it out would be to try it out - I think there’s a limited free trial period. If you have a Windows or Mac PC then you can install the mymedia program on that.
Here’s a link which explains how to integrate your NAS for indexing:
ps: I’ll get a pic of the echo show later this afternoon.
Here’s the Show 5 playing an album from my NAS:
(Any idea how to get rid of the Try ‘’ Echo ...’’ line ? )
Lol. Nope, there isn't at this time and it irritates the hell out of a lot of users.
But that IS cool. I downloaded the mymedia thing to experiment seeing how it works to stream music from my iTunes library that is on my Mac - not a good long term solution, but just as proof of concept, and it is showing some error in indexing the playlists, that I need to get to grips with when I have the time.
I downloaded mymedia to my Mac to stream music from the Mac as just proof of concept. It shows some error in iTunes library indexing that I need to address. This artwork for local libraries working on the Show IS cool and may even encourage me to learn Raspberry, if I can get the proof to work.
And the spam filter has struck again.
I PM’ed Ryan about this over 8 hrs ago … nothing in return
I PM’ed Ryan about this over 8 hrs ago … nothing in return
It’s 7:30 a.m. in Santa Barbara, California.
I PM’ed Ryan about this over 8 hrs ago … nothing in return
It’s 7:30 a.m. in Santa Barbara, California.
I have to sleep sometimes…. I restored the posts a couple hours ago, just circling back here to let you know.
Thanks!
Yes thanks @Ryan S. I will copy/paste only the latest conversations from the PM with @castalla , now that Ryan has restored our filtered out thoughts.
@castalla said this:
Get it working on the Mac first. Setting up a Pi is relatively straightforward ... if you have a standard NAS setup. What is your NAS? My response:
WD My Cloud NAS, a 2016 model. I doubt it can host the application and make it work. Hopefully Pi won't have a problem to access the music files that sit on it.
@Kumar … I wasn't sure if I should add this here, or in the other “pragmatic” thread, but thought you and others may be interested in a video by Mr. Darko half a year ago that I just stumbled across. Mentions, off-hand, a number of devices covered here and elsewhere (and references a previous video he did that I’d already seen quite some time back on network streamers other than - and in relation to - the Sonos Connect) and is otherwise a good watch.
My problem with Darko is typified in this video - he will keep 5 things, one on top of each other that are basically the same device, say that each one is better than the one below it, and not do a single level matched blind test to back up his subjective opinions. While I could not hear any difference in my Connect compared to a Marantz KI Signature SACD player, back in 2011, which also had a DAC in it that had many alpha numeric characters in its description in the manual. Neither could I hear what a USD 1500 Musical Fidelity DAC did in my system, that weighed more and was larger than most HiFi amplifiers, and even had a couple of valves in. And feet that turned from red to green to tell you when the valves had come to operating temperatures! All this, in my audiophile past life, and it was that Tube DAC that caused my “enough of this nonsense” moment.
So all that he offers is what the HiFi magazines did before I stopped reading them - information about what is available in the market.
The present status on the Mymedia is that I am able to have Echo Show play with artwork the sample media that is downloaded into their app, that is hosted on my Mac. So proof of concept is established for local music. Now we have to see if this can be extended to music that is sitting on the NAS.
If Sonos via a controller hosted on the Mac can access and play music from the NAS, logically this also should be possible. Except that I have found that there are so many twists and turns that are not in plain sight where networking is concerned, that apparent logic is easily defeated.
Awaiting response from mymedia support...email sent to them.
@castalla
See the screenshot for how the Finder looks like: the Sonos controller is pointed to WDMyCloud and thence to the last SharedMusic folder - nestling inside that are more folders, all that contain music files. Sonos does not care about that arrangement, it just accesses all music tracks that are in the various folders within the SharedMusic folder.
But in the MyMedia dashboard, I cannot see the WD in this fashion.
In mymedia dashboard, under Watch Folder’ option what is listed?
