Same here.  It’s very disappointing that such a basic feature that’s been there years is suddenly not working

I have these same two problems. Is there an issue list that the Sonos developers might reply to to give us an idea of target dates for a fix; or at least to acknowledge the problem?

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

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.

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….

Sonos has gone to ****.  They've completely forgotten about the older, legacy, users and instead focussing on a new breed of users who don't know what they've missed

Moderator Note: Modified in accordance with the Community Code of Conduct.

@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.

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?

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. 

Same issue no album art shown on new app on android 

Radio station logos also not shown 

I’m sorry, but i think you have missed the real issue here :

Prior to the App update, the Album Art on my Android phone worked perfectly.

Now it doesn’t.

Nothing to do with a temporary issue in my opinion, nor any of your suggestions to fix it.

Album Art still appears correctly on the latest Desktop App, picking up from the same NAS files that worked perfectly with the old Android App.

As it does on my iPad following the latest App update. 

I am not alone in raising this issue and I am sure the Sonos App team are fully aware of the issue.

What I haven’t seen on the new App “improvement”/bug fix  roadmap is any mention of Album Art.

Moderator edit: Quoted post removed due to being spam

Yes, same with folder.jpg as you say. I forgot about that but I do also have a subset of WMA files that have a folder.jpg file in the containing folder for the album art. Doesn't display with the new app, and does under 16.1.

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

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….

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?

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

How does a person downgrade to a previous version?

@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.  

Hi @press250 I checked this out while obsessing about Album Art and both Playlists and saved Songs do show up in the Sonos Favourites section as grayed out with no art.  But, at least on the tablet I run the black controller on (now V80,02.05, 3 June), I can click through and then send the playlist/song to a speaker as expected.

One of my playlists has a mixture of tracks from my local library and a cloud service.  They all play fine but the cloud tracks bring the art with them and the local ones don’t.  Huh??

And yes, I can confirm that art doesn’t show up anywhere in the Android app, and I’ve looked most everywhere.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯  indeed! What were they thinking?

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

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!!!

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!

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.

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.