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.

I love the optimism @MoPac, tho’ I’m afraid I don’t share it. One of the ‘benefits’ of the blank-sheet-of-paper-rewrite new app was a “write once, run everywhere” codebase. So it is mighty odd that local library album art works great on iOS and it is totally missing on Android. Note that streaming album art does work on Android, so even more odd.

Given the long list of “this doesn’t play music” bugs plus features to be implemented, I fear that the lack of local library album art has been filed as a low-priority ‘aesthetic’ matter.

Oh yeah, how could I forget: the Android app still doesn’t support the signature “TV Audio Swap” feature  for Ace headphones, which gives a sense for where the Android app stands with the powers that be.

 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.

Perhaps better to start another topic/thread to get replies to your questions.

This one was specifically about the missing album artwork after the release of the new Sonos App . 

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

press250: 

 I can play through Sonos speakers via UPnP apps with no issues except it’s not gapless.

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?

Just to add to the other tales of woe, no album art on Sonos Android app. Can see everything fine on my PC and I have a Marantz amp that uses HEOS, the app for that happily picks up the album art. I guess the lack of album artwork is low down the Sonos fix list.

Alex

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!!!

Also have this issue since the new app.

I used to have 2 artwork files in each album: AlbumArtSmall.jpg and Folder.jpg.

Today I took 1 album and put the artwork into the mp3 files as suggested in https://support.sonos.com/en/article/missing-music-library-album-art-in-the-sonos-app and but that does not help.

Also used ‘Scan for New Content’ in the Music Library in Sonos on Android.

I also have an app on Windows, Linux and believe it or not, also on my Toon thermostat. They all show all the artwork which is in the folders. On Linux and Windows I used the function to start indexing but nothing seems to help. I really think it is something not functioning in the Android app itself.

I use use Mp3Tageditor https://www.portablefreeware.com/?id=1137

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?

Yes, I have hundreds of CDs with carefully copied folders.jpg files that will not display album art in the updated Android app.  The app has also lost the “update music library” option. (I have to go to my “unofficial Sonos Controller” for Linux!)  What gives?  This is expensive equipment!

@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.

Nothing.  Surprised?

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….

Teamwork, my good Johnny, we’re here for the teamwork!

Your instincts are very much aligned with my own: DNLA endpoints promise a better degree of long-term stability than anything using a vendor-specific protocol.

Beyond DLNA-compliant speakers, consider something like the WiiM Mini paired with high-quality (not wireless) self-powered speaker(s); it supports DLNA and AirPlay 2. Stepping up to the WiiM Pro adds Chromecast Audio and is Roon Ready. This is very likely the route I’ll take to cast from Audirvana.

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

Sonos speakers are not DLNA (or UPnP) compliant. There’s a thin layer of UPnP at the network level for discovery—why you see your Sonos devices on a Windows machine—but the protocol above that is proprietary. I plugged away at this for some time as I hoped to cast from Audirvana (which supports DLNA and UPnP) to my Sonos system.

I don’t know if Roon took an informal route (à la SonoPhone) or has an agreement with Sonos. In either case, maintaining that connectivity relies on some degree of ‘goodwill’.

@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.

Nothing. Surprised?

Yip iPad has album covers. Android phone does not. What are s9nos saying about this, anyone know?

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

@jreddaway, I understand how this must have went down all too well  Although the first instinct is to blame the developers, it seems much more likely to me that the leadership pushed them to release without adequate time to complete functionality and most importantly, to test. They had a date (I’ve seen others around here assert that it was the date of the headphone release), and it had to ship, no matter what state the software was in. As the old saw goes, it takes 9 months to make a baby no matter how many women you put on the job.

I only recently learned of the Sonos/Blackberry connection, and as it happens, a couple months ago, watched the recent Blackberry movie. It’s quite good; a docu-comedy-drama that tracks the rise and fall. As someone who worked in startups for most of my career, I found it particularly spot-on and hilarious. Highly recommended!

Currently, I have gone back to the prior app and regained my system as I knew it, but I am wondering how long this can go on. I have to take care not to allow the app to get updated, which is easy enough if not an ongoing pain from the perspective of the Play store. The bigger fear I have is that the app itself prompts to do an update, which I think is a speaker firmware update. I can prevent the Android app itself from updating via the Play store, but if I slip up within the app (or the Windows app, which I also use) and let it update the speaker firmware, I think it may well break backwards compatibility with the old app, and then there will be no recourse but to move to the new app.

I currently run the new app on my tablet and an old phone. I did this on the theory that I could monitor progress on the new app and determine when and if it becomes usable. However, because it is prompting to do an update, and I’m ignoring that for reasons outlined above, that plan is not working at all and I’m not seeing whatever updates have occurred.

I’m currently thinking that I should remove a speaker from my existing system, and use it to create a second, entirely separate 1-speaker system in my house, using the new app in this mini system. That way I could allow the app to update the firmware on the single speaker and really see how the app changes without risking the stability of my overall system. I just started looking into how one would go about doing this. I do have a second Wi-Fi SSID in my house, and various old spare computers in my basement, so I think it should be doable. It is rather a pain to have to go to such lengths, though.

I did take a brief look at BlueSound and it looks pretty interesting, need to delve into it further. I’ve seen so many posts here where people say they are selling or have sold all their speakers already. I’m pretty risk-adverse and that’s far too fast for me to move! I will have to think and research for a long time before I’m comfortable enough to make such a big move. But, I could certainly see myself dipping a toe into the water by buying a single BlueSound speaker and setting up a small test system. I have spent an enormous amount of time and effort to build my music library and it is an important part of my life (sort of the kind of idea that Sonos used to say they cared about). I have to be open to the idea that this debacle may be the universe telling me that it’s time to move on from Sonos.  

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

the phone & windows app updates lost connection to my music library.  Was a very happy happy happy chappy now super unhappy and want to chuck the speakers out of my house into the rain outside… hate them so much now..  totally unhappy.