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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@castalla : thanks for the above and beyond levels of assistance here, via PM and emails.
I followed the instructions for mounting the WD - over and above mapping it to the Mac so that it could be seen by the Mac as had been done in 2016. This mapping was enough for Sonos to use the WD as NAS, but even after the mounting that has been done per the link you sent, the mymedia dashboard is still not listing the WD as a drive that can be selected for indexing.
Since the mymedia app did work to allow Echo show to play media downloaded to the Mac from mymedia, this is puzzling and frustrating, because the solution to NAS play on the Show seems to be in sight!
Wish a Mac guru could help out here!
Success!!! thanks largely to @castalla - all I did was not give up:-). Highly appreciated, the day into one long night effort.
So now, via the mymedia solution, I have my 19637 NAS tracks made available for the first time to Echos via voice command play, with album art where the Echo Show 5 is present. And wired as it is to the Line In of the Connect Amp, this can continue until the Sonos hardware dies. This is something I ended up exploring only because of the Sonos legacy event and will give the NAS a new lease of life; NAS supplied playlists also won't miss volume normalisation as much as streaming service often do. So, a plus for the Sonos decision in an unexpected way.
At USD 5 a year, it is a bargain, this solution.
I have to admit it took quite some playing around to get it to work, and I can't recollect all I did in the process to various settings. It will mean leaving the Mac out of sleep mode when the music is playing, but will not need any other interaction with it for music to play. At some time I will see if I use this enough to justify a leap into the unknown that is the Raspberry to take the Mac out of the loop completely.
What remains to be seen is what happens if two Echo Shows are grouped, wired to Sonos Line In jacks, and one is asked to start playing from the NAS - will the other one also show artwork? And more important, before the artwork question - will two Echos playing in multi group mode play this source? I have my doubts. Even so, for little money, this is a good solution for single zone play.
I will leave with a picture, of Echo Show 5 playing an album from the NAS, with album art, commanded to start play via voice command, through Sonos Line In. A very neat solution that needs Sonos for just amplification.
Congrats!
Sadly it won’t work for grouped echos - an Amazon problem, apparently.
A pi solution would likely be easier to set-up (with some finnicking about - but the advantage is that’s there lots of help available).
A low-cost option would be a rasberry pi 3b+ - the newer pi 4 is probably overkill
ps: my O2 Joggler project is continuing … updated pics soon.
Sadly it won’t work for grouped echos - an Amazon problem, apparently.
But it will work for Sonos multiroom activated via Line In - so all that will be missing is album art in more than one location. And that multi room will also work in one Sonos system as long as the hardware works.
Success!!! thanks largely to @castalla - all I did was not give up:-). Highly appreciated, the day into one long night effort.
So now, via the mymedia solution, I have my 19637 NAS tracks made available for the first time to Echos via voice command play, with album art where the Echo Show 5 is present. And wired as it is to the Line In of the Connect Amp, this can continue until the Sonos hardware dies. This is something I ended up exploring only because of the Sonos legacy event and will give the NAS a new lease of life; NAS supplied playlists also won't miss volume normalisation as much as streaming service often do. So, a plus for the Sonos decision in an unexpected way.
At USD 5 a year, it is a bargain, this solution.
I have to admit it took quite some playing around to get it to work, and I can't recollect all I did in the process to various settings. It will mean leaving the Mac out of sleep mode when the music is playing, but will not need any other interaction with it for music to play. At some time I will see if I use this enough to justify a leap into the unknown that is the Raspberry to take the Mac out of the loop completely.
What remains to be seen is what happens if two Echo Shows are grouped, wired to Sonos Line In jacks, and one is asked to start playing from the NAS - will the other one also show artwork? And more important, before the artwork question - will two Echos playing in multi group mode play this source? I have my doubts. Even so, for little money, this is a good solution for single zone play.
I will leave with a picture, of Echo Show 5 playing an album from the NAS, with album art, commanded to start play via voice command, through Sonos Line In. A very neat solution that needs Sonos for just amplification.
Unplug your Internet connection and see what happens. I bet it won’t be pretty.
@arcadelt : Of course it won’t be pretty, the indexed playlists are in the cloud, it is just the music that is local.
It also won't be pretty if I unplug the mains, so I fail to see your point. My internet provider isn't talking of any event in May 2020.
@arcadelt : My internet provider isn't talking of any event in May 2020.
Trust me, it will happen when you least expect it and when it is most inconvenient. Without the Internet, not only will the voice assistant fail, but you will even not be able to use the Alexa app to control anything. Anyway, as I said, better to be prepared, so unplug your Internet and see how the system holds up.
I know what will happen in that rare event and I have back ups in place that do not need the net. Or even WiFi and the mains power.
@arcadelt : My internet provider isn't talking of any event in May 2020.
Trust me, it will happen when you least expect it and when it is most inconvenient. Without the Internet, not only will the voice assistant fail, but you will even not be able to use the Alexa app to control anything. Anyway, as I said, better to be prepared, so unplug your Internet and see how the system holds up.
Not to me it wouldn’t! Routers on UPS, each has an Echo attached … so, only in the very unlikely event that both ISps go down at the same time would there be silence
Lol. I have a UPS backed up by a DG set. And there are memory heavy handhelds filled with streaming service downloads for offline listening that I use on the road, easily attached to Sonos Line in jacks, so there would never be silence, even if Sonos went completely bust and their servers went offline, or my ISP went down. And at the end of the day...or night assuming doomsday, there is always the acoustic guitar:-).
These are doomsday scenarios; all are far more remote possibilities than events triggered by Sonos, or their going bankrupt. But this Brexit is a good thing, it has allowed me to take even that bankruptcy possibility into the design of my music delivery systems.
I’m not talking about Sonos being a problem, but the Echos.
Sonos have found a way to play streaming services music without the internet?
Are you being deliberately obtuse? Sonos will work locally on a network without the Internet, but Amazon and Google devices will not.
I still completely fail to see what point you are making. Perhaps I am stupid, perhaps English is not my native tongue. Sonos will work, but limited to music that is available locally. But with 90% of users - per Sonos - now using Sonos for streaming services, it will not work for these 90% minus the internet.
Amazon devices follow the thin client approach as opposed to what Sonos does, and in doing so, rely on reliable internet service being available in support of that approach; and even in India where I live, these are now reliable enough to make use of thin clients without losing any sleep over doing so.
Is it different in your country? If yes, then Echo is not for you.
Moving on...because this is now off topic.
Hardly off-topic. Your original post and this one were both about trying to find pragmatic approaches to dealing with the what you are calling Sonos Brexit. I am merely pointing out that by introducing any Echo or Home device into your setup you are introducing a weak link, because it will not work when the Internet goes down. You have introduced these into your setup.
That will be a problem for some people, including myself (if you want an example why, I’m happy to provide it), and I am just pointing out an issue within the context of the topic why yours is NOT NECESSARILY a pragmatic solution to the declaration of legacy devices for those that do not wish to spend anymore with Sonos, but would like the same outcome.
However, my point appears to not be understood, so I will move on.
Interesting; what you seem to be suggesting is that my solution that involves Echo devices is not pragmatic because it needs the presence of the internet for the solution to work.
To that, I have no argument to present. For some one that is either unwilling or unable to rely on the availability of the internet, Echo/Google is not a solution, pragmatic or otherwise. Agreed, 100%.
And of course those that want the present outcome of Sonos working in local mode from a NAS to continue, there is really no need for a solution if Sonos is to be believed in what they now say: that if anything in legacy systems will be affected short of hardware failure, it will be streaming services functionality - which such people are not using anyway if they are not relying on the internet, so there isn't a need for any solution.
Here’s a follow up to my posts about controlling sonos speakers with an O2 Joggler touchscreen.
I’ve now got the US version of the Joggler working - in fact this is actually a Cisco Energy Monitor with front facing internal speakers. Little used so the screen protector film is still in place.
(If only Amazon would implement dlna/upnp for the Echos ….)
@castalla : in terms of features and outcomes, how is this different from Echo for streaming/Echo via mymedia for NAS?
It’s using Logitech to access and stream to devices (includes local library). Echos don’t have upnp/dlna access so they are essentially a closed system.
Here’s a view of Albums and Playlists
@castalla ; Yes, but does it survive loss of internet?
Seriously though, leaving aside this closed/open system thing, what does it do that Echo+mymedia cannot? Or, in a more elegant way?
The more I use mymedia - which is working fine, to the extent that I think I will treat myself to an Echo Show 8 at the present discounted price - the more I see Raspberry making sense as a small box tucked away in WiFi range, always on via a USB charger so it cannot be pulling a lot of electricity, allowing the Echo Show 5/8 to remain open to streaming from NAS as well as from streaming services with album art. Using the desktop Mac works fine, but is a little clunky to use seeing that it is often left with the lid down when not in use.
@castalla ; Yes, but does it survive loss of internet?
Seriously though, leaving aside this closed/open system thing, what does it do that Echo+mymedia cannot? Or, in a more elegant way?
The more I use mymedia - which is working fine, to the extent that I think I will treat myself to an Echo Show 8 at the present discounted price - the more I see Raspberry making sense as a small box tucked away in WiFi range, always on via a USB charger so it cannot be pulling a lot of electricity, allowing the Echo Show 5/8 to remain open to streaming from NAS as well as from streaming services with album art. Using the desktop Mac works fine, but is a little clunky to use seeing that it is often left with the lid down when not in use.
Because the LMS server and the NAS are on internal network then an internet down won’t affect media library function (in fact my ‘NAS’ is actually just a usb stick on the router - could just as easy be a real NAS). I must admit I don’t use the local music much anymore, but others have pretty complicated setups with fancy tagging, playlists, etc.
Once you ‘crack’ the NAS mount on the pi (which should be straightforward in your case), install the mymedia program, that’s basically it. Switch on and forget. (setting up the Pi does involve using SSH (PuTTy, or mac equivalent) and a bit of typing commands in the Pi terminal.
Because the LMS server and the NAS are on internal network then an internet down won’t affect media library function
Just that makes it worth the research to see how this solution gets implemented - any place or link you can point to?
Sadly, not really … it’s a all scattered over the slimdevices forum.
Essentially, the steps are to get LMS running on a Pi or such - easy once you have a basic Pi setup using an OS called Raspian (a version of Ubuntu/Debian). Once the LMS is running with access to your music library, then additional players can be declared to the system using plugins (one of which is UPnP/DLNA with a setting for Sonos). Everything above that is optional.
It’s just that the basic steps are done via terminal. For LMS, almost all the setups, management is done via the web interface (like mymedia console)
What do you use for the display? It is wire connected to something?
