I have been using Sonos for several years, and it is attached to a streaming service and my music library on a USB drive, which has years worth of accumulated music, including a lot not available on streaming. I have just (8 May) updated to the new Sonos app. Now I can still see and trawl through my music library, but cannot search in it. The general search function just returns the streaming and Sonos radio results, and there’s no dedicated search for the music library. This effectively cuts off my access to my own music, by making it prohibitively difficult to find anything. Please bring this functionality back. I know you want to prioritise revenue generation, but this is disrespectful to your customers.
Bring back the ability to search music library
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Userlevel 5
+6
Inceedibly idiotic, do they want to force people to go streaming?
No need to force people that way. It’s already what the vast, vast majority of people want and use.
Yep. Local music is a declining thing, less than 10% of Sonos usage back in 2017, certainly less than 5% today. However, the nonsense about them removing the ability to play local music because of some moustache twirling evil plot to force people onto streaming services (that Sonos make no income from) is silly. It’s just not a priority, and as such, a half-baked app that never should have been released had less prioritized items in the half that was not baked.
Great point! I don’t understand why the local music is declining. I always like to have my own music so I can play a song or piece of classical music whenever I want. I’m not sure if you can do that using a streaming service. Even though I am extremely frustrated with the new app and the number of features they omitted for now, I’m learning a lot listening to everyone’s problems and how they use the Sonos systems. I didn’t realize that there are a lot of users who subscribe to streaming services. But if you stream, can you save a song and place it in your current music list (or queue)? Over the years, I have looked up a lot of background songs that I hear while we are watching some movies on TV and I purchased them in the iTunes Store…. And somehow, I was able to search for something in my local music library, which is on my NAS drive. After I found the song, the only option was “to add song to the end of queue”, which was fine, and once they iron out the queue trouble, I should be able to reposition that song. I wish I could remember how I did that. I only remember that I did it on my Sonos PC app and not on my iPad. Oh, and I just removed a number of songs from one of my playlists using the Sonos PC app. So as I mentioned in another post a few days ago, I rely on my PC app for a lot of things. When I bring up the app it still has the brown box with the black lettering. It is S2 version 16.2. I hope they don’t change that.
Userlevel 5
+6
Inceedibly idiotic, do they want to force people to go streaming?
No need to force people that way. It’s already what the vast, vast majority of people want and use.
Yep. Local music is a declining thing, less than 10% of Sonos usage back in 2017, certainly less than 5% today. However, the nonsense about them removing the ability to play local music because of some moustache twirling evil plot to force people onto streaming services (that Sonos make no income from) is silly. It’s just not a priority, and as such, a half-baked app that never should have been released had less prioritized items in the half that was not baked.
Great point! I don’t understand why the local music is declining. I always like to have my own music so I can play a song or piece of classical music whenever I want. I’m not sure if you can do that using a streaming service. Even though I am extremely frustrated with the new app and the number of features they omitted for now, I’m learning a lot listening to everyone’s problems and how they use the Sonos systems. I didn’t realize that there are a lot of users who subscribe to streaming services. But if you stream, can you save a song and place it in your current music list (or queue)? Over the years, I have looked up a lot of background songs that I hear while we are watching some movies on TV and I purchased them in the iTunes Store…. And somehow, I was able to search for something in my local music library, which is on my NAS drive. After I found the song, the only option was “to add song to the end of queue”, which was fine, and once they iron out the queue trouble, I should be able to reposition that song. I wish I could remember how I did that. I only remember that I did it on my Sonos Windows PC app and not on my iPad. Oh, and I just removed a number of songs from one of my playlists using the Sonos PC app. So as I mentioned in another post a few days ago, I rely on my PC app for a lot of things. When I bring up the app it still has the brown box with the black lettering. It is S2 version 16.2. I hope they don’t change that.
Personal anecdote means nothing in the face of actual facts. The vast majority of content streamed on Sonos is via streaming. Local library use pales in comparison.
Userlevel 5
+6
Personal anecdote means nothing in the face of actual facts. The vast majority of content streamed on Sonos is via streaming. Local library use pales in comparison.
Sorry to say, I have no interest in streaming music.
Personal anecdote means nothing in the face of actual facts. The vast majority of content streamed on Sonos is via streaming. Local library use pales in comparison.
Sorry to say, I have no interest in streaming music.
Which is personal anecdote. The vast majority of Sonos users disagree.
I work for one of the 3 major music companies and yes, the streaming services definitely dominate over the physical space but so what? There are also a ton of local artists putting out great music that a lot of us have collected over the years, and that we used to search for and play on our Sonos systems. Why drop a perfectly good feature from the new app?
I’ll tell you why:
The streaming services need to know what you’re listening to. That’s how they know how well they’re doing and how they figure out who gets paid (artists, labels, etc.) and how much. It’s all based on the percentage of streams. If you listen to your own stuff they have no way to count that.
I’m not into conspiracy theories, but what if Spotify and Pandora told Sonos “don’t take away the option to play from a personal library; just make it a little harder so people play from the services instead”.
I definitely hope they come to their senses and let us search our libraries in the next update. It’s the right thing to do.
Sonos has not dropped local libraries from the new app! A portion of Sonos users aren't seeing their local library due to Sonos dropping the supposedly insecure SMB v1 and HTTP sharing. There are dozens of threads discussing this, with steps to get a share onto SMB v2/v3. There's enough wrong with the app without going into conspiracy land.
Hello,
I am no lover of the new app. When I spoke to Sonos support they said the inability to search NAS libraries was a bug/flaw that was being rectified, I hope this turns out to be true. I also find the new app less intuitive, the volume bars are harder to use and you have to hit apply for some reason. I’d be happy with the older app back but we all know that isnt about to happen.
I also have an issue that Amazon Music doesnt play, seems to let you select the album then it just skips each track, does anyone else find that?
Looks like it is - https://support.sonos.com/en-us/article/the-new-sonos-app-and-future-feature-updates
Yes, the volume bars are very difficult to operate. They don’t respond half the time and you have to line up your finger just right.
Agree the new app is awful, especially the inability to search your own library. In my opinion the search engine has always been erratic and is now worse. Search and select from a streaming service and it plays something else. Weird and annoying.
I have been using Sonos for several years, and it is attached to a streaming service and my music library on a USB drive, which has years worth of accumulated music, including a lot not available on streaming. I have just (8 May) updated to the new Sonos app. Now I can still see and trawl through my music library, but cannot search in it. The general search function just returns the streaming and Sonos radio results, and there’s no dedicated search for the music library. This effectively cuts off my access to my own music, by making it prohibitively difficult to find anything. Please bring this functionality back. I know you want to prioritise revenue generation, but this is disrespectful to your customers.
sonos is taking it's time to do something. I bought sonos 10 years ago for two reasons… itit was intuitive and it play my own music stored in my house. after a crapy soft migration do any of those 2 things survived?
and do you know how long it took them to provide their original soft of the ability to see your previous search or played songs? years!!!!! customer is last with sonos.
Sonos has not dropped local libraries from the new app! A portion of Sonos users aren't seeing their local library due to Sonos dropping the supposedly insecure SMB v1 and HTTP sharing. There are dozens of threads discussing this, with steps to get a share onto SMB v2/v3. There's enough wrong with the app without going into conspiracy land.
Searching local libraries is scheduled to be released in mid-June, which means any day now.
https://support.sonos.com/en-us/article/the-new-sonos-app-and-future-feature-updates
Local library search and playback delayed to July in order to address feedback from beta testing.
Surprise… why on earth did they remove it in the first place… why on on earth are Sonos doing beta tests NOW and not months ago?
Local library search and playback delayed to July in order to address feedback from beta testing.
Surprise… why on earth did they remove it in the first place… why on on earth are Sonos doing beta tests NOW and not months ago?
They didn’t remove it. The app was rewritten from scratch, and it was only half-done when it was released. Not a big difference to you, but a significant difference if one wants to know why things are missing.
You can still search the Music Library in the Windows app, so it’s being indexed and updated. It’s just not in the UI for mobile devices. As a software professional, it’s astonishing how incompetent the Sonos UI designers are, to have forced such a terribly-regressive product on their user base. Cardinal rule of software design, you DON’T use your users as unwilling ALPHA (not even BETA!) testers. I hope they get a lot of people moving to other platforms, serves them right! This is a HISTORICALLY INEPT occurrence, one for the textbooks.
Local library search and playback delayed to July in order to address feedback from beta testing.
Surprise… why on earth did they remove it in the first place… why on on earth are Sonos doing beta tests NOW and not months ago?
They didn’t remove it. The app was rewritten from scratch, and it was only half-done when it was released. Not a big difference to you, but a significant difference if one wants to know why things are missing.
Although it also seems that Sonos wants to redirect the entire interface through their servers. With respect to the streaming services, sure this works fine. But it makes it VERY unstable when accessing one’s own library. Even when I can access my library (it’s hit or miss) the app is slow and unstable. If this is all a way for Sonos to monetize my music selections, then I have no sympathy for their problems.
Userlevel 2
I might just put the money I was going to spend on a new Sonos zone into purchasing a lifetime Roon subscription instead. Should allow me to search my own purchased music again!
Music library search has now been released in the android app at least.
Gav
+2
Music library search has now been released in the android app at least.
Behaves a little weirdly tho.
I used the new client (on iOS) and searched using a track which I knew was in my local list - it appeared.
A few hours later, I did the same and it didn’t appear. Search locally didn’t do anything. I’d not changed anything.
Removed library, re-added, re-indexed. Song still didn’t appear. But also my album list had some single entries for *some* albums but for other albums it seemed to break it down by track.
So it’s got issues, and it’s not been tested. :-(
Update: Just had a quick look at this. Seems that one of my CDs has “Artist” as “Ms. Dynamite” for some tracks and other tracks (something like - they differ) “Ms. Dynamite/Keon Bryce”. In the controller music library settings, I’ve tried the “Group albums using” option as either (the default” of Album Artists (all the Album Artists tags is “Ms. Dynamite” on this album” or “Do not group compilations” - both seem to behave in the same way - looks like this is being ignored.
Not being able to search albums was a pain, effectively messing up the albums is (to me) a bigger pain.
Search seems not to work at all at the moment. No results from any source. Just getting “Something went wrong” message.
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