I have two houses, each with their own Sonos systems. For a long time, I had a single Music Library (ML) at the primary house, hosted on my Synology NAS. When at my secondary house, I did not have access to that ML, as it seems you have to be on the same LAN. I recently installed a Synology NAS at my secondary house, which replicates the content on the NAS at my primary house. I successfully added a second ML to Sonos from the NAS at the secondary house, but when I try to access content at the secondary house, it seems Sonos tries to get the content from the ML at my primary house and can’t find it.
How do I switch between ML’s on separate LANs? Do I have to delete the one on the other LAN, and then re-add it when I switch locations? Or is there a better way?
Directly access or are you using a favorite or list?
Do you swap players between homes? Are the drive names the same? Are the both homes part of the same SONOS household?
Directly access. Example: album A, track 1, present in both ML’s. Attempt to play the track, I get “Access denied. Couldn’t play track1.mp3”
No problem playing content such as Pandora or Bandcamp, in other words, non ML content. ML at the secondary house (where I’m at) added and appears in the list of ML’s.
Do you swap players between homes? Are the drive names the same? Are the both homes part of the same SONOS household?
I have a Roam I move between, but both houses have their own Sonos systems. Drive names are different. Both houses are separate households, e.g. Home 1 and Home 2.
FWIW, I haven’t tried it yet, but I suspect if I delete the ML in Sonos that’s at my primary house, that the content on the ML at the secondary house will work. Kind of a PITA to do each time, was hoping for a more seamless solution, than to have to re-add and index each time I move between houses.
I imagine there are ways to link the two LANs to appear as one, but my secondary house uses an ISP (guess which one) that has CGNAT, so it would be tricky.
How do you transfer the ROAM? Since there are two different systems, you’ll need to Factory Reset ROAM and Add it to the “other” system -- for each move.
Check both systems and make sure that only the appropriate local library is defined.
How do you transfer the ROAM? Since there are two different systems, you’ll need to Factory Reset ROAM and Add it to the “other” system -- for each move.
Check both systems and make sure that only the appropriate local library is defined.
I don’t have to do anything when moving the Roam between houses. It just appears in the system for each house. And, if I’m “somewhere else”, and I just have the Roam with me, the app will find it and create a system with just the Roam in it, without any input from me.
As for your comment about the “appropriate” ML, that seems to be the issue. The clunky problem is that there is no way in the app to “select” a ML. You can delete it, but you have to re-add and index when I go to the other house, and also delete the other ML. Replicating a NAS across two or more households isn’t that unusual, I was hoping there was a more seamless solution.
I guessing my only option is to delete the ML that’s on the other LAN, then add/re-index when I switch locations. Will give it a try and report back.
OK, like all things Sonos, all of a sudden, without me doing a single thing, it seems to be <partially> working now. I can access some of the content from my new ML now. Who knows? Even weirder, it seems like the content I’m able to access is somewhat random. If I can see the album art, then I can access it. I’m hoping that if I just wait long enough, all of my content will eventually become accessible - or not! Thanks to all, will update if I learn anything more.
I’m doing a re-scan now, hoping that will enable all my content. As I told someone long ago about working with computers, “why” isn’t always as important as “how”. If it works, I’m good with it.
OK, another update, and an updated “Best Answer”. It’s much simpler than I thought, and I wish Sonos would update their support docs to include this info. It seems that each defined Sonos physical system can independently define which ML’s it uses.
I have an ML at each house location which are identical and sync’ed via services on my two NAS boxes. The confusion for me was that ML1, which was at House 1 and on its LAN, was showing up in the list of ML’s when I was at House 2. ML1’s content was inaccessible at House 2 because it’s not on House 2’s LAN. When I created ML2 at House 2 from the replicated content on House 2’s NAS, the presence of both ML’s with identical content apparently caused some conflict issues.
The solution? Delete ML1 from the list of ML’s when using the system at House 2. As soon as I did this, all my content from ML2 became accessible. Why didn’t I do this before? Because I didn’t realize that ML’s are independently associated to each defined Sonos physical system. I haven’t tested this, but I suspect it’s true, even if you have multiple ML’s and multiple Sonos physical systems on the same LAN.
Why didn’t I delete ML1 earlier? Because I thought it would delete ML1 from my other house’s Sonos physical system. Just logged into a PC there that has the Sonos app on it and verified ML1 is still there and the system is working fine. And, under “Manage libraries” in the PC app, only ML1 is showing up, not ML2.
