@mcallisterjp Thank you for bringing your concerns to us here and welcome to the Sonos Community. I am trying to follow how you set this up. Have you downloaded the podcast(s) to you Android phone or to the 3rd party device OnePlus 3? The link you shared shows, if you downloaded them to the phone you should have access to them in the Sonos app under browse and then on this device. Can you confirm that you can see the podcasts on the phone in the correct download area and play them from the phone to the phones speakers?

I would also like to see a diagnostic report of your system. You can reply back with the report number here.

Hi John,

Thanks for your reply. I am a little confused by this question:

Have you downloaded the podcast(s) to you Android phone or to the 3rd party device OnePlus 3?

My android phone is a OnePlus 3 device.

I can see and play the files from the Podcasts directory using either the “File Manager” app or the android-native “Files” app. They do not appear on the Sonos app under “On this mobile device”.

I have uploaded diagnostic bundle 1587024178.

@mcallisterjp Thank you for the follow up information and the new diagnostic report number. This seems more like a phone issue with your downloaded podcasts and how the phone is sharing the data with Sonos. Can you play a stream of music from TuneIn or Spotify without issue on Sonos? This may also be network configuration issues not allowing Sonos to see the data on your phone.

The diagnostic report does indicate that you can benefit from a full network and Sonos equipment re-boot, as well as trying to move you Sonos product to wifi channel 1 or 6 as most things on your network and in the area are on wifi channel 11. This could help reduce any wifi interference from your setup. Please try these steps first:

1. Power off/on your modem/router(s)/extender(s)/access point(s) for 30 seconds with no lights.
2. As they are powering back on the power off/on your Sonos product(s) for 15 seconds with no lights.
3. As they are powering on then re-boot the device(s) running the Sonos app.

When you are connected back to your system please test a streaming music service like TuneIn or Spotify. Please let us know if there are any issues playing them on Sonos. You can then then test the saved podcasts on your phone to Sonos and let us know the testing results along with another diagnostic report and report number here.

Lastly, if you can provide us any screen shots of what you are seeing as long as it does not show your personal information please share them here as well.

Yes, Spotify works fine through the Sonos speaker, so I don’t see how this particular problem could be networking-related.

I will try changing the wifi channel anyway though, if you think it’s likely to help in general.

I think I used to use Podcast Republic - isn't there an option about sharing it with other ‘things' and Sonos is explicitly mentioned?  Have you ticked that option?

To be honest I found listening to Podcasts in Sonos to be too much of a faff and they didn't appear in Podcasts but in the Songs/Artists section.  More and more they just seem to be mp3's now - check there. For example some of mine appear as Artists such as BBC Radio 4 or BBC Radio 5 Live..

@sjw I don’t think so, no. Definitely not in the section about downloaded files, anyway.

Yes, it is a bit of a faff. What I’d like to be able to do really is just cast the audio output of the phone directly to the Sonos speaker, but this doesn’t seem to be how the software’s set up…

Just checked, it is the App I currently use that has that option - Podcast Addict.

They still don't appear in the Podcast section though - but as described above. (On this Mobile device - Artists etc..)

@mcallisterjp Thank you for the follow up information. The issue you’re describing is with the Podcast Republic app and how it is storing the audio files. If the app is storing them as offline it may only be accessible to the phone and not to Sonos. We also will need you to confirm if the podcast app is creating these files in a supported audio format for Sonos. You will want to reach out to Podcast Republic to confirm this information.

The other steps were provided to clean up issues of performance that were showing in the diagnostic report for Sonos on your network. This could affect the way your phone and Sonos are allowed to communicate on the wifi network to see the store files on your controller.

Please complete the provided steps above and confirm information with the app provider. You can then follow up here with any screen shots, testing results and new diagnostic report and report number.

The problem appears to have been with how Sonos’ file indexing interacts with a (mis-)feature of the android OS — the root Podcasts folder contained a zero-byte .nomedia file which had the effect of making Sonos ignore that folder path. For future reference, the solution that looks like it’s working for now is:

• Delete Podcasts/.nomedia
• Create WhatsApp/.nomedia (without this, Sonos sees WhatsApp media files and nothing else)
• Reset the Android Media Scan database and cache
• Reboot twice

This took a lot of experimentation to come up with, as I’m sure you can guess. I’m not sure why I’m apparently the first person to hit this problem…?