New app does not display music library album art

@jreddaway, I am finding out that I’ve been living under a rock; first BlueSound and now Roon! I am embarrassed to say that I really haven’t been paying attention and I thought Sonos was the only game in town for a whole-house music system. I took a cursory look at Roon and of the two, seems the most appealing because I could continue to use my existing substantial investment in Sonos speakers; buying 10 BlueSound speakers was a daunting idea. 

I also have not been paying attention in terms of Sonos speakers being usable as a destination source for other music players, such as Windows Media Player and PlexAmp. I have long noticed that my Sonos speakers are shown in Windows Explorer and also in Windows Media Player, but I pretty much ignored them. But after seeing a post elsewhere here pointing out that they can be destinations, I looked into it and presto! I was able to play (cast) music to my Sonos speakers from my PlexAmp Android app. It was a revelation that I should have figured out long ago, doh!

I do have Plex as well; it points to the same music library on my Synology NAS that Sonos does. I use Plex to play my music in my car via Android Auto and PlexAmp, which I love. Because I had Sonos for home use I had not bothered to consider Plex for that. I previously tried using Plex as a source through Sonos, but found it laggy and decided there was no particular reason to do it, since I could just access my music library directly. I think it was laggy because rather than streaming Plex directly from my home network, I believe Plex was sending my music up to the cloud and then back down to Sonos. I have since upgraded my Plex server from a very old box to a fast new box, so I think the performance would be good now, but still little reason to bother with it. Except I guess it would show the music art 😁

I will definitely install Roon and give it a try. It sort of sounds like Roon is a company where Sonos was in 2006 when I discovered it via this article. The subscription cost is daunting, that’s for sure. If it wraps up everything in a bow with a great UI as you say, it could be really compelling for me. I mean I’ve been yapping about how important my music library is to me. I might have to put my money where my mouth is 😁

I do not know a lot about it, but I think the reason that Sonos speakers are able to be destinations for other systems such as Roon is that they are DLNA compliant. Since that is an industry open standard, I would think that it would be a major no-no for Sonos to move to bar Roon or any other systems from accessing their speakers.

Aha, thanks for that info. It certainly gives one pause! 

Hi again @Johnny Rico, and hello to @press250 

I have been checking out possible alternatives which might keep my Sonos gear doing what I want it to do once what seems to be the inevitable shutting down of local library access happens.  

I have been looking at Roon and Plex, spending a bit of time to get a feeling for their relative attractiveness as a fall-back music management system.

Bear in mind that I am using a Windows 10 PC with Sonos S2 V16.2 installed, a relatively low-powered Synology DS118 NAS running SMB1 (for my TV) , 2 and 3 where my library sits happily and Android controllers with the Black App on one and the Gold App (S2 V16.1) on the other three. I have to say that my system (7 players, 6 of which are hardwired, static IP addresses all round) is to all intents and purposes 100% stable on the hardware side.

Anyway, here’s what I have learned about the two possible player software packages:-

Hardware

Roon would not install on my NAS, which to all intents and purposes runs 24/7, as it doesn’t have the processing power Roon needs.  I installed Roon on my PC pointing at theNAS library and it ran fine.  I don’t like having the PC running 24/7 in order to play music and established that if I was to decide to run Roon I would have to either buy a more powerful NAS or get a small, probably NUC based, dedicated machine on which to install Roon and have it running 24/7.

Plex installed happily on the NAS. It took several hours to index my library (14K tracks), probably because of the low power of the unit, but would clearly be happy to work from there for as long as one wanted.

Winner?  Plex, as it it doesn’t require any new equipment in order to run 24/7.

Connectivity

They are quite different in how they are accessed.  

Plex is installed as a Service so it is tightly integrated into the Sonos UI. I found it a bit touchy to get connected properly and had fairly regular “Something went wrong” or whatever messages when it dropped out. 

Roon on the other hand runs outside of Sonos with its own interface; it fires up from the PC or wherever it’s installed, instantly locates your Sonos speakers as it loads up and you then select where to send the music, group speakers etc from the Roon UI.  My concern for the long term is whether Sonos, for whatever reason, remove the network discovery facility mentioned by @press250.  That would be sheer bastardry but I wouldn't put it past them….

Winner?  Roon, which only depends on Sonos as transparent hardware infrastructure. 

Indexing, metadata etc

Both applications pull a huge amount of information from the cloud about every item in the Library as they index it. Plex however can only display the information which fits the Sonos UI template.

Roon, because it runs its own UI, is able to present an amazing range of biographical etc information about Artists, reviews of Albums, song lyrics, photos etc etc which go way beyond the very limited information stored in the file tags to which Sonos is restricted.

Winner?  Roon, because it is independent of the Sonos UI

Interface/UI

Plex is just another source of music in the Sonos UI so it is subject to the quirks and limitations of the Sonos interface including search and queue mangement.  It does have an app which allows you to play your library on your controller, but that has no relevance to the Sonos use case.

I have to say that Roon’s UI is very impressive indeed with any number of bells and whistles, many of which I probably didn’t find. My only real gripe was that the volume control, which is  very frequently used, is tucked away down in the bottom right corner and you have to click an icon to bring up the slider; if I was to become a Roon user I would agitate for that control put up front on the main screen with the usual player stop/start etc controls.  Apart from that the main screen is gorgeous.

Both have similar abilities in terms of lookups from tracks that are playing or in the queue (view all songs, search the artist etc) so they are pretty good on that score.

Winner?  Roon, because it is independent of the Sonos UI

Responsiveness

Plex has to load through the Sonos system and seems to be a bit slower to load than Roon, which loads direct and comes up very fast.  Moving between tracks is probably a little bit quicker, again, in Roon.

Winner?  Roon, because it is independent of the Sonos UI

Album Art

This is an obsession of mine, and one of the biggest issues I have with the Black App which completely fails to handle it for local material.  It is also the area where Sonos in its Versions up to 16.x is clearly better than either of these alternatives. Whereas Sonos is (or rather was) rock solid in handling both Folder.Jpg files and, where present, art stored in individual file tags, the others are disappointing on this front.

Both Plex and Roon do pick up album cover art from the library but they seem to only pull the Folder.jpg file if there is one. My approach has been to tag every track in compilation albums, the first one with the album cover and the rest with their own images, and not to have a Folder.jpg file in that folder; this works perfectly in Sonos.  Plex takes the art from the first track and uses it for every other track, ignoring any art they may have in their tags.  Roon seems to grab an image almost at random from one of the tracks in the folder and then use that one image for the entire album in playback, again ignoring the images stored in the track tags.

Winner? SONOS!

There are many other details I noticed during my brief experience with Plex and Roon but that exposure has brought me to a decision as to where to go from here.  

You can see from my comments above that for me, from a UI/UX point of view, Roon is a clear winner; it is extraordinarily powerful, its UI is very good but not perfect, and it uses whatever Sonos hardware it finds very transparently. 

Plex, while it is probably a good option for those who play from their music libraries on their hand-held devices, is hamstrung by having to work through the Sonos UI to play on Sonos hardware with all the issues that brings.

So what is my thinking?

If money was no object I would turn to Roon today as my UI, but in order to do so I would have to (a) spend several hundred whatevers to install the hardware it needs to run independent of my PC and (b) shell out USD12.49 monthly in an annual subscription or pay USD829.99 for a lifetime one.  I’d rather not do that right now.

My Conclusion

Call me naive but I do believe that Sonos will, eventually, sort out the Black App and give it back at least the functionality that’s there in V16, Album Art being top of my wish list.   I acknowledge the security, responsiveness and internet dependence issues which Sonos’ decision to run everything in the Cloud brings with it, but if the UI and UX are sorted out I guess I can live with them. 

So I’m going to give Sonos a few months to get things sorted, while being very careful to avoid any firmware “upgrades” unless I can get a very clear understanding of what they will do.  If/when Sonos contrives to block library access or forces through some sort of subscription model I will almost certainly take a deep breath and spend the money required to run Roon so I can continue to get the benefit of my investment in my excellent Sonos hardware.

It's such a crying shame that Sonos seem to be incapable of anything approaching professional standards of software management, or of the most basic courtesy in their customer relations, but I’m going to stick with them for now.

Fingers crossed….

@jreddaway, thank you, thank you, thank you for such a comprehensive comparison/analysis! I frankly think you ought to pull that post out and create a new post for it so that it can get more exposure than our little backwater on the specific topic of album art. It deserves to be read and I think there are a lot of people who would appreciate it.

I myself have started to process of familiarizing myself with Roon. I’ve watched some good introductory videos on YouTube, and I am working towards initiating my trial. Because that trial is limited, I need to get some ducks in a row with my system so that I won’t squander that trial period. It is a little arcane, but if anyone is interested, because my library is so large, I primarily use playlists; “imported playlists”, not Sonos playlists. I have many and these are in the form of old school Windows Media Player playlists (WPL files). The reason is historical, because that’s what I had before I got Sonos. It’s actually a bit more involved than that, but in a nutshell, I noted that Roon only supports M3U playlists, so I plan to write a little C# console application to convert my WPL files into M3U files on an ongoing basis. Further complicating things is that we are in the process of moving to a new home, so my tinkering time is limited. It will probably be several weeks before I get to the point where I am ready to try Roon. But from the research I’ve done so far, I am very taken with it and really look forward to trying it.

I originally tried running Plex on my Synology NAS (DS112j), but quickly gave up on it because it was underpowered. Then for several years I ran it on a leftover Windows 7 box but a couple years ago finally moved to a NUC (SimplyNuc’s off-the-shelf Plex Media Server build, apparently discontinued) and haven’t looked back. It is a terrific little server with all the power Plex needs.

I understand your choice after your analysis. I will see how Roon does with the art when I trial it. For me, it sounds very much like the way Plex works and what I am used to. I use Mp3Tag (recommended!) to embed 600x600px album art (from Album Art Exchange, free and recommended!) into every mp3 file. This is perhaps excessive, but I have the space, and I’m a stickler for consistency. When I copy the files into my library filesystem, Plex picks them up and will select its own art, often not of great quality. I then edit the album in Plex and select my higher quality art. Sonos automatically gets the embedded art in the mp3 file. So in this way, I get my good art when I play in my car with PlexAmp, or when I play at home with Sonos. I don’t know yet, but I’m thinking that this workflow will mesh with Roon fairly well. We shall see.

I am not hell-bent on replacing Sonos and am open to the possibility that they can fix their awful black app and return it to something comparable with the prior gold app. Then again, how pathetic is it that we sit here pleading for a return to a prior long-standing status quo? As such, I am also open to the possibility that Roon may be really compelling for me, and really attuned to what I want in a music system. For me, I don’t consider myself giving Sonos a chance or feel I’m sticking with them. I feel that they’ve broken the compact with the way they’ve handled the disastrous rollout of that app. I had faith in the company and product, but no more. If that is the quality of thinking going on, who is to say they won’t do something so disastrous again? I was a decades-long customer and evangelist, but now I’m a free agent. If they can right their ship, I might stay, but if another system like Roon is intriguing, I’m gone. I brings me no joy to say it.

Have I missed any updates from Sonos on the topic of missing artwork on Android?

It still isn’t working on my Android phone and I really miss it.

Is there any commitment from Sonos on when it will be fixed?

I agree. This is a problem with the Sonos Android App. 

I have made no changes to my music library location, folders or artwork files since the new App roll out.

Historically the artwork appeared without any issues on all my Windows, iPad and Android devices.

Now it only works on my Windows and iPad devices.

So come on Sonos. Bet your act into gear and sort out the Android App or tell us what we are doing wrong!!!

I can also say that I got no covers on Android…

Also pinning a folder on the main menu… doesn’t work even if it tells you it does?

 Any Roon users…. Is Roon gapless playing to a Sonos device??

 Not an Android user so my art shows just not in the queue.  The queue is a mess anyway so maybe when they fix that the art will be fixed as well.

 Sorry to hear Android users are having so much trouble.

Agree with the last statement about the problem is the Sosos app on Android.  My wife has an iPhone 15 and  I have a Galaxy Z-fold.  The phones use the same network and hardware.  She gets the album art and I do not.  Process of elimination.  The only thing we don’t have in common is the phone/OS.

Perhaps if enough of us bitch the Sonos CEO will need to issue yet another apology.  BTW I tried adding my PLEX as a service with the same playlist. Laggy and clumsy but when it worked, it did have the album art.  Something works if it uses the Services protocol vs. saved content on attached disks.  I sense a configuration issue on the handoff.