New app does not display music library album art

Agreed. Album art on Android for local music libraries just doesn’t work at all. I’ve checked both files with embedded art, and folder.jpg (which is what I use most of the time).

This isn’t just a nicety - when there are literally thousands of albums I can’t remember what everything is called so I drill down to an artist (thanks for breaking the scrolling guys) and distinguish visually.

Also agree that the music library doesn’t necessarily show up on the front screen. Both on phone and tablet.

I agree.  The inability to display jpg’s of album art is a major drawback.  Often the track title itself doesn’t provide the information that an album cover provides...which is why many of us made sure a jpg of the cover was available…. 

Going back and embedding art into 000’s of individual music files is a laughable suggestion.

Whatever you folks do, please don’t update the Windows app….

Agree, yet another failure in the new App.

All the album art in my NAS Music Library displayed perfectly on the previous S2 App.

So why not now Sonos?

Please don’t tell me I need to go through all my album folders and change the name/format of the artwork for each album.

Same here. I have to say that the new app has major user experience issues. 

How does a person downgrade to a previous version?

The Sonos App Update is a horror!  After mandatory updating, there was nothing wrong with the prior app, I immediately lost my music library.   I uninstalled the new app and reinstalled the prior app to discover it would  require me to update.  It was unusable.      

After waiting an hour on hold waiting for a technician, the process to restore my music library was so involved I had to permit the technician had to take control of my desktop.  I have never, ever, not under any circumstance allowed that to happen for security reasons, until this happened.  It took an hour for the technician to restore the music library.  Don’t even think about taking it on unless you have at least two hours to dedicate to the cause! 

I then mentioned to my surprise the music library had not been restored on my mobile app.   That apparently is not possible at this time.   Perhaps in a month or so it may be available.   Until then I can only access my music library form my desktop.  If necessary I was reassured I could wait another hour on hold to get a technician’s help to restore the music library on my mobile app when it became available.  

What happened to Sonos?   Why did Sonos not only release an update that was not consumer ready, it imposed the half baked update on Sonos users?   Very disappointed in Sonos!   

Mark

Sonos just ruined a Memorial Day weekend party at our shore house. Planned music for months to control from my mobile chair. Thanks 😡

It is not possible that this app had any organized testing of all supported music sources on all supported platforms. Further, I assert that it had no alpha nor beta in the field with a subset of real users covering all supported music sources on all supported platforms. I defy anyone at Sonos to refute me by providing their test plan docs. I will eat crow if I'm wrong. However, that will beg the question of why it was still released with so many defects. 

Mysteriously this morning my music library appeared on my iPhone mobile app and worked properly.   🎉 However about an hour later my music library disappeared, only to reappear later in the day.  🤔  To say the app is unstable, at least at this point, isn’t an exaggeration.   As for album cover art; music I purchased online and downloaded has album art.  Music is loaded into my music library from CDs do not have album art.  I can live without the art.   

The technician I reached after on hold for an hour was helpful, pleasant and got it working.   As it stands I have hope I won’t need a technician again. 🤞
 

Mark
 

Hi @Johnny Rico , you are clearly very concerned about Album Art as I have come across a thread you started a year ago on this subject, and there are probably others; I hope you got your issues sorted back then so you could enjoy your Album Art for at least a while before the downgrade to V80.x hit.

Like you I’m an Android user and like you I have been a bit obsessive about curating the Album Art and tagging my 14k music files (FLAC).  Like yours, most of my art is 600x600; I use Folder.jpg files for all folders but, with compilation albums, I also embed art in each track related to the track’s artist. I keep my library on a Synology NAS as you do.  So I very much appreciate and share the disappointment that V80 brought with it; I too have rolled back to V16.1 and continue to enjoy almost all of the original functionality - the search and queue management issues being the glaring issues, but they are for other threads - and a system which is very responsive and pretty much 100% rock solid.  At least I can see my Album Art!

What really pi**es me off is that, from what I’ve seen in other threads, the iOS app update which came out this morning has brought local Album Art back on display and reinstated at least part of the search/queue management/playlist function.  I thought the same might apply to the Android app so I did an update to check it out, found that neither of these had happened and rolled back to V16 where it all works as it “should”.

As far as I’m concerned Album Art is a big factor, particularly where, as in the Controller app, it takes up a lot of the screen and is a real feature although in the WebApp it is so small as to be almost invisible despite appearing in two locations. What I cannot understand is why, if the system can fill those frames with art brought down from the cloud when you’re playing tracks from a service, it can’t grab images from the files sitting right next door on your local network and which it is actually playing with no problems.  And it can’t do it whether the art is embedded in the file or in the approved Folder.jpg format.

I am resigned to hanging in with my Sonos system of 7 players, which I would really rather not have to pay to replace, in the hope that the coders, who must be going crazy trying to sort out this mess, can bring back the central functions we have had since day 1.  As an Album Art obsessive, giving that back would make me much less unhappy.  When can we expect it?

@jreddaway, I did get my album art to display properly most of the time. On one of those old threads, I got some great help in diagnosing a dump of my system, and some good advice on rearranging my speakers to not sit next to other devices that gave off interference, such as phones and other electronics. Most of my speakers were indeed co-located next to other devices, and making some placement adjustments did a world of good. That said, I do still find annoying times when that stupid default logo is shown for one or two tracks during playback. I have resigned myself that whereas album art display was  always completely rock solid, those days are mysteriously gone and I’m happy when I hear a great tune and pick up the phone and switch to the app to gaze at the album art, it shows properly most of the time.

I’m a retired software developer; not on mobile platforms but on Windows. There was one right way to roll this app out in order to respect the installed base of customers, and that was to put it out while retaining the existing apps. If that had been done, it would not have been an issue to leave out features initially and add them back over time. If you want to move people off the legacy app, you make the new one compelling, and they’ll switch. Over time, you can finally retire the legacy app when the new app provides all the functionality of the old one. To completely replace the legacy app with one that is missing key functionality from the get-go is just not done and a guaranteed way to infuriate your installed base. It is hubris of a level seldom seen but they did it and they own the fallout.

I am afraid that whereas people like you and I were once Sonos’ target customer, we are no longer. The new app seems completely targeted towards streaming customers. Whereas you and I and many others have 5 or 10 speakers in our homes and lovingly curated music libraries that represent the soundtracks of our lives, I picture the new Sonos target customer to be someone with one speaker (probably a Roam at that!) who only streams Spotify. 

How Sonos can make the decision to cater to such a non-committed customer over those of us who have spent literally, literally thousands of dollars on their products over many years is a product marketing plan that is too elusive for me to understand. But I’ll tell you this: we are moving to a new house in a month and I had been planning to take the occasion to finally replace my old school home theater system (receiver and 5.1 physical speaker setup) with one of the Sonos home theater designs, likely an Arc, Sub and 2 Eras. I was going to spend $1800 on this. Past tense. That plan is no more. I’d have to be an idiot to make that sort of investment after the debacle of that new app. Can things change? They can, but I’ll have to be persuaded and thus far I’m not.

Yes @Johnny Rico , you and I are both veritable dinosaurs in the new Sonos universe with our old-fashioned local focus and our wish to curate and enjoy our own collections of music.

You, as a former software developer, must find it excruciating to watch this slow-motion train smash grind along; I, as a former marketing guy, just cannot comprehend how this ever got approved although I think the key thing is your observation that “I picture the new Sonos target customer to be someone with one speaker (probably a Roam at that!) who only streams Spotify”, which I have been thinking for quite a while now. 

The whole design of the Black App and, even more so, of the WebApp points in this direction. A couple of examples among the many I keep noticing are that there is no real Now Playing screen with album art etc in the Web App, just a little bar with controls on it across the bottom of the screen and tiny cover art (if you’re streaming, but not from local content!) there and in the tile for the current player over on the right.  If you just stream media you probably do it through a phone in your pocket or purse, so why would you be interested in a decorative screen?  If you don’t have a local library to play from, why would you be concerned by the lags imposed by having to send the data involved (and perhaps this is where the album art comes in) up to Sonos’ servers and back to get it to your screen? Or by the security issues this creates which many people are concerned about? There are many, many other things that just aren’t there for us dinosaurs and probably never will be, but I’m sure this is the model for the Sonos UI and the UX behind it from now on.

My pet theory is that Patrick Spence was so traumatised by the demise of BlackBerry, where he was the marketing chief but bailed out before the proverbial really hit the fan, that he is overdoing the management of change at Sonos in an attempt to avoid what happened there.  I came across an interesting reference here

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/062315/blackberry-story-constant-success-failure.asp

which has some telling comments about how a company lost its way when, from a rather smug position of market dominance, it was faced with rapid change in the form of the technical progress which prompted the first generation of real smartphones, which ate its lunch very quickly before it could adapt. 

I think Spence, who will surely have an enormous amount of hard data about both how the owners of the installed base of Sonos players use it and what current sales and research say about where demand is heading in real time, has determined that the corporate future lies with precisely the customer base you described.  He and his marketing people have crunched the numbers and decided to make what they see as the inevitable change from local to cloud based content now in one fell swoop.  If what he knows for sure is the minuscule number of dinosaurs with their old fashioned use case don't like it, tough. We can talk about hubris, arrogance etc but he’s made the big call and what we’re seeing is the implementation of a slash-and-burn marketing plan through which he hopes to avoid taking Sonos down the BlackBerry road while we just fade away if he ignores us for long enough. And making rollbacks available would be sign of weakness in accommodating the dinosaurs, so I for one don’t expect to see that happen. Incidentally, I’ve been interested to see a lot of ads for discounts on Sonos hardware in the last couple of weeks.  All part of that big plan, no doubt.

Well, good luck to them with that. 

I’m going to keep an eye on how the Black App develops, watching for it to regain enough functionality to be worth moving over to (exactly the point you mentioned where users transition because it’s worth doing) and then try to lock things down till my hardware dies.  Until then it’s the Gold App for me.

As for you, which way are you going to go with starting to wean yourself off Sonos in your new place? BlueSound for that home theatre setup looks like a good start….

Cheers

John

Hi again, @Johnny Rico .

I continue to wonder about where to go from the deep hole Sonos have dropped us in and have been experimenting with Plex, which I found unsatisfactory, probably because I didn’t really understand it, and now Roon.

I have to say that my first impressions are very favourable indeed.  It installed simply, indexed my library very quickly and - most important! - immediately picked up all my Sonos players and was streaming to them with full control within minutes of starting the installation.  It has an astonishing range of data integration capabilities which make Sonos look very basic indeed and it even has full search functions as well as queue and playlist management!  Quite a novelty after recent Sonos experience.

There are, of course, things that are not perfect; it distinguishes between Sonos products which are “Roon Ready” and those which aren’t and, while it groups units in the same category just fine, it won’t group across the categories.  It does unexpected things with album art in circumstances which I don’t yet understand, but at least you can see it! There will no doubt be other things which emerge along the learning curve, but I am well impressed at this stage.

I guess it’s the difference between a hardware company struggling with software and a pure software play, as both their UI and their UX are way more sophisticated, powerful and polished than Sonos’.

The big thing, of course, is that it’s a subscription service.  I have taken up the 14-day introductory offer and will continue to explore Roon while I wait and see how Sonos progress in winning back my trust as I would stay with them if they sort out the Android interface properly.  I have a feeling though that if they force us into a subscription model as many seem to expect, I will end up with Roon.  My concern for the medium term is that Sonos might modify the firmware in the speakers to exclude Roon.  I’ll have to be careful about locking down.

You might like to have a look at it on the free trial basis.  Nothing to lose!  

Cheers

John