Good point on impatience. Too much of it today, yes. Too hair-triggered, too often. My impatience is impatience with incompetence and the lack of corporate accountability to address that incompetence. 

Sonos continues to push users to update to its new software even though anyone who updates will lose his or her inventory of playlists compiled over the past few years. The absence of any option to create new playlists is another fundamental flaw/shortcoming that has yet to be addressed in any of the subsequent Sonos updates. So, impatience, yes, but sometimes impatience is warranted. Especially considering the investment in Sonos hardware and the trust invested in its IT competence that its customers have made. Both of which now seem bad investment bets with devalued future returns.  

Not sure playlists have disappeared. They should be there on the Windows or Mac desktop apps, they’re just not showing up currently for some people in the app. I’ve not lost access to any of my playlists since the app update.

Good point about today’s impatience acceleration. Too often emotional fuses are too short on too many fronts; might be the result of social media-induced attention span erosion. But impatience here is impatience with incompetence combined with a dearth of corporate  accountability in the wake of a premature release of a software update that devalues the usability of expensive hardware. Add to this Sonos’ ongoing push for customers to update their software to the new and fundamentally flawed update. An update, by the way, that still severs users from all the Sonos playlists they have carefully compiled over the past few years and provides no way for those users to even create new playlists.

Also, there is no sign from the Sonos IT brain trust that those fixes will be coming anytime soon – if at all.

When investing an hour or two waiting online or on-phone for Sonos IT help that provides no answers or any details of when Sonos solutions might be available, then, yes, patience is tested.

Sonos maintains and updates information on the app and the coming fixes here:

https://support.sonos.com/en-us/article/the-new-sonos-app-and-future-feature-updates 

Apologies for the repeat on the impatience response. The Sonos forum is often slow to update.

Happy for you that you have not lost access to your playlists. I am not so lucky. And there are no answers from Sonos or anywhere else why I, and a lot of other Sonos users, are not so lucky. We should not be spending our time trying to determine what is behind our bad luck. And luck should not be a factor in the use of what should be reliable technology.

Timothy: If you’re like me, you’ve collected hundreds or thousands of tracks in ‘Sonos playlists’ that suddenly disappeared. You’ve implored Sonos to restore access to them, wondered if they are lost forever, spent time on Sonos chat trying to figure out whether it’s something about your own network setup.

That’s not being ‘impatient.’ And it’s not your fault, much as Sonos may try to convince you it’s a case of ‘user error’ or that you just lack the ‘courage’ to ‘try new and better things.’

It’s inexcusable. And there is a 99 cent fix, if what you want is to find your Sonos playlists alive and well. It’s a 99 cent 3rd party app. It’s called ‘phonos+’

You can install it for free and for 99 cents get all of its functions. You can pull up a text list of your Sonos playlists. You can play them in the app, but won’t be able to add or subtract groups of speakers, adjust volume or EQ.

But if you choose a playlist in the phonos+ app, then go to the new Sonos app, your selected playlist will be active there, with all of the other basic settings also available. 

It’s a little bit clunky, but it works. And it’s a huge relief to know the playlists you gathered together over the course of years are still in existence and playable. 

Now ask yourself ‘why didn’t Sonos fix this right away’? I don’t know and cannot for the life of me imagine why.

Good point about today’s impatience acceleration. Too often emotional fuses are too short on too many fronts; might be the result of social media-induced attention span erosion. But impatience here is impatience with incompetence combined with a dearth of corporate  accountability in the wake of a premature release of a software update tlike today’s CrowdStrike/Microsoft debacle] that devalues the usability of expensive hardware. Add to this Sonos’ ongoing push for customers to update their software to the new and fundamentally flawed update. An update, by the way, that still severs users from all the Sonos playlists they have carefully compiled over the past few years and provides no way for those users to even create new playlists.

Also, there is no sign from the Sonos IT brain trust that those fixes will be coming anytime soon – if at all.

When investing an hour or two waiting online or on-phone for Sonos IT help that provides no answers or any details of when Sonos solutions might be available, then, yes, patience is tested.

Hi @bcomTom .  You might be interested to see that the penny has definitely now dropped at Wirecutter.

https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/sonos-player/

Corporate seppuku.

Thanks to Chambolle for alerting me to the Phonos Plus work-around to the Sonos Black tech fiasco. The third-party app can find all the Sonos playlists that Sonos inexplicably cannot find. It requires a couple of extra steps, but at least all the music tracks and playlists that you likely spent many hours collating and organizing are visible and usable. Why Sonos cannot figure out how to retrieve data created in its app when a third-party company can is lamentable. It raises - or should raise - management concerns about the competency of its IT department, which continues to release Sonos Black updates that make no material improvements to the seriously flawed original update. We are three months into this update debacle and there is still no sign of users being able to find their lost playlists or create new playlists with Sonos. Would it not make sense to solve those two fundamental issues first? Anyway, the Phonos Plus solution will reconnect you with your playlists. That will give you peace of mind and set you on the road to exporting those lists to another more reliable music format/technology. At that point you can move on from Sonos permanently.

1. The data is not “created in it’s app”, the app is just a controller.  99% of the data used by the Sonos app is directly from the Sonos hardware and/or from a music service via the Sonos hardware.
2. The 3rd party app is using an old version of the Sonos Control API which uses UPnP for discovery.  That’s why it works on some systems when the new Sonos app does not.  That API is going away, so the 3rd party apps will eventually not work, which won’t have anything to do with the talent of the developers.  If the new Sonos app is not working on your system, then there is probably something hampering the mDNS discovery used by the new app.  You should at the very least send a diagnostic to Sonos so they can look at your data and see if there is a reason mDNS is failing.
3. Since the original crappy release, the updates have corrected the following list of issues and/or missing features (a list that is incomplete):

• Added setup, configuration, and search for local Music Library
• Improved account settings for Sonos Pro subscribers
• Improved line-in autoplay and compression settings
• Improved accessibility in Settings
• Improved notification for player firmware updates
• Updated the volume icon to reflect the volume level
• Amp/Port can be configured for Stereo or Mono output in Android
• Improved Sub audio settings with Amp
• Improves stability when adding new products
• Addresses an issue where the app used excess phone battery
• Improves responsiveness of volume changes
• Improves time to add a new song to the queue in certain conditions
• Addresses an issue with local library browsing timing out
• Added setup, configuration, and search for local Music Library
• Improved account settings for Sonos Pro subscribers
• Improved line-in autoplay and compression settings
• Improved accessibility in Settings
• Improved notification for player firmware updates
• Updated the volume icon to reflect the volume level
• Amp/Port can be configured for Stereo or Mono output in Android
• Improved Sub audio settings with Amp
• dded multi-product setup for professional installers for iOS
• Improved accessibility for configuring alarms with VoiceOver and Talkback
• Added autoplay setting for analog devices using line-in for Android
• Added support for SonosNet channel selection for Android
• Added timezone settings for iOS
• Added the option to forget a system in order to connect to or create a new system for iOS
• Improved notification for player firmware updates on Android
• ntroduced mute button on Android.
• Added numerical values to the volume and group-volume sliders.
• Updated the volume icon to reflect the volume level on iOS.
• Added stereo or mono configuration for Amp/Port output on iOS.
• Improved TalkBack screen reader support for volume sliders on Android.
• Added support for SonosNet channel selection on iOS.
• Expanded support for service reauthorization on Android.
• Added sleep timer settings
• Added “play next” and “add to end of queue”
• Improved Home Feed scrolling
• Improved setup reliability
• Added WiFi configuration for products with BLE
• Improved battery consumption for Bluetooth discovery
• Improved ability to update older firmware systems
• Further improved navigation for visually-impaired customers
• Added VoiceOver support to read toast message automatically on iOS
• Introduced mute button on iOS
• Improved local library connectivity
• Improved Trueplay setup on iOS
• Added distance settings for surrounds
• Added line-out settings for Sonos Port
• Fixed an issue on Android that affected initial setup for new users
• mproved VoiceOver support, allowing for easier navigation and control on the Now Playing Screen, System View, Output Selector, Queue, Volume Sliders, and Add Product.
• Improved TalkBack support for the Now Playing Screen, System View, and Add Product.
• Improved Local Music Library playback of folders.
• Added the ability to Search for content to use with an Alarm.
• Improved system connectivity for Boost and portable products in sleep mode.
• Fixed issues with Add Product that resulted in incomplete registration, a need to sign in again, or inability to confirm a product PIN.
• Fixed an issue with enabling Surround and Sub Audio.
• Fixed an issue that blocked Trueplay if a TV was the input source.
• Fixed an issue with asking for Local Network permissions.

@jgatie: I have not the slightest idea what ‘mDNS’ means; nor is that something I should be expected to know in order to play recorded music using a consumer product. 

Yes,  I have sent ‘diagnostics’ to Sonos support. Sonos was not able to provide any meaningful guidance, other than things like ‘it’s a known issue’ and ‘that will be addressed in a later update.’

No, that is not something the purchaser and user of a consumer product reasonably expects to deal with. And that long laundry list of glitches that Sonos evidently spent the past three months resolving reads like a marathon game of Whack A Mole. It’s what should have been done before the new controller was not only unveiled, but force-fed to millions of Sonos users — most of whom, like me, don’t know ‘mDNS’ and ‘UPnP’ from their elbows; and should not have to know, any more than I should have to be a BMW certified mechanic to get in my car and pick up a loaf of bread at a nearby bakery.

Further, I’m certainly troubled by your passing reference to the possibility that Sonos may, at some unspecified time, and likely without warning, do something or other to the ‘API’ — whatever that is — and wipe out my Sonos playlists again, as it did on May 7. If that’s in the works, Sonos had damn well better do a much better job of alerting users about what’s coming and be ready with a solution that doesn’t require countless hours of fiddling around waiting to reach support and messing with trial by error ‘solutions’ that ultimately do not work.

Seriously. This is not normal. 

I’d attempt to explain terms like mDNS or API, but something tells me you wouldn’t give a fat rat’s a** what they mean or how it affects your use of the Sonos app, so I won’t bother.  I’ll just say this:

Sonos has absolutely no responsibility to alert you when a 3rd party app is going to stop working.  Zero.  They have nothing to do with that app or have any responsibility to keep it working.  You even expressing a wish that they do shows a bias so obvious, a blind man could see it. 

As technology changes we must continue our education in order to keep up. Consider a human who is freshly brought from the wild into a modern home. Since there is likely no place to build a fire, the individual would not be able to cook. Simple tasks, such as running water would be out of reach. We consider all of these tasks to be “simple” because they were introduced to us by parents and siblings shortly after birth.

Another tip of the hat here to Chambolle, who raises good points and identifies some key Sonos user frustrations. I do not know who jgatie is, but I’m guessing that he or she works for Sonos or has some inside information about the laundry list of patches, fixes, and band-aids applied to the original Sonos update in the company’s parade of subsequent updates. Thanks to him or her for that list of details. It’s long, but list length is not what Sonos users need. Nor do we need Updated Volume Icons, Responsiveness of Volume Changes, Added Timezone Settings or other cosmetic tap-dancing around the central issue of lost playlists and lost music queue creation functionality.

I appreciate jgatie’s insights as to where and how the Sonos data is created and controlled. But, again, however it is created, controlled, archived or accessed, it does not work.

And I, too, have sent Sonos a diagnostic and received the same “it’s a known issue … that will be addressed in a later update” robot response – this after waiting 90 minutes on a phone to connect with a help-desk human.

I do not have another 90 minutes to invest in repeating a process that I know will yield the same result.

If something is “hampering the mDNS discovery used by the new app,” as jgatie suggests, why has Sonos not invested its IT time in tracking down that something instead of improving talkback screen reader support, adding sleep timer settings, introducing mute buttons, adding distance settings for surrounds, improving accessibility in settings or other embroidery to an app that is now largely useless for recalling and creating music playlists?

@jgatie does not work for Sonos, otherwise his account would be listed as such. He is a long time contributor to these forums. I suspect he collated the list of ‘fixes’ from here.

You’d be surprised at the long list of complaints over volume change response, along with other complaints you list as “cosmetic tap-dancing”.  You also missed many core functionality fixes like local library access and additions to the queue.  But that is neither here nor there.  Nobody is going to be completely happy with how Sonos goes about fixing this app, because it shouldn’t have been released in a broken state in the first place.  So nothing Sonos does is going to be satisfactory.  However, given that built-in bias, it may be beneficial to look at this sans emotion, and not try to twist reality by saying Sonos has done nothing.

I get it, you miss playlists.  It is a priority for you, and that makes it disappointing they haven’t been fixed.  But you know what?  I have exactly zero Sonos playlists and I couldn’t care less if they were ever fixed!  Does that make me right and you wrong?  Of course not.  But it doesn’t make Sonos right or wrong either.  There’s two possible reasons why playlists aren’t fixed.  One, it’s a harder fix that is taking up more LOE, or Sonos has made it a lower priority because they know how many people don’t use Sonos playlists (me) vs those that do (you).  Either way, they are going with the data, at least that’s the way I look at it when I see no local library album art or crappy queue editing. 

In addition, I really don’t think the window dressing fixes are the responsibility of the core function or architecture teams, nor are they the same skillset.  I’m sure the efforts of one are not taking away from the efforts of the others; the people working on mDNS or playlists are not fixing volume button numbers or other “embroidery”, and vice versa.  Nor should they be. 

RIght you are.  Gone are the days when I had to keep the list of forum requests that had been fulfilled. 

@jgatie says : Sonos has absolutely no responsibility to alert you when a 3rd party app is going to stop working.  Zero.  They have nothing to do with that app or have any responsibility to keep it working.  You even expressing a wish that they do shows a bias so obvious, a blind man could see it. 

That, of course, is not what I said. It’s a straw man jgatie stood up and knocked over; another manufactured opportunity to engage in confrontational, insulting and holier than thou rhetoric.

But Sonos does have a responsibility to keep its own product working and not to issue — and even leave users no choice but to accept — a product riddled with more disabling and annoying defects than one can count.

It also had a responsibility to warn me and millions of others] before it released a new app that made Sonos playlists suddenly disappear; that for a time even made it impossible to find and put tracks together in a queue; that made the app fail to load or crash more often than not.

Yet Sonos did just that in May; after issuing a press release touting the new app as ‘easier, faster, more customizable’ and all-around wonderful. It was not wonderful. It didn’t even work. It was an unmitigated fiasco.

Sonos has repeatedly released ‘fixes’ since then that create new problems and that have made many users wary of accepting the ‘fixes,’ with a well-founded fear things would only get worse if they tried the newest ‘fix.’

Only a fool would attempt to argue that it was good practice for Sonos to release a terribly flawed product and then expect consumers to endure months of frustration while it attempts to fix what it broke. At one point, Sonos even appeared to blame consumers for ‘lacking the courage to try new things’… again, not something any rational person would argue is good practice.

Furthermore, I never should have needed to resort to a 3rd party app in order to restore what is one of the most basic functions of the Sonos system for me and a large number of its users owhether jgatie uses that function or not.] It’s not something I ever wanted to do or expected I would have to do to work around Sono’s failure to deliver a functioning product.

That’s on Sonos, not on me. Believe me, I approached the whole idea of using what is essentially a bootleg product with extreme trepidation. The somewhat sad fact of the matter is that without that workaround, my Sonos speakers would have been pretty much useless to me since May, and would remain so now.

That’s not a function of ‘bias’ on my part. Au contraire. It’s about common sense. It’s about quality control. It’s about what consumers justifiably expect from the seller of consumer goods and services. 

Thanks so much for posting this. It, in much greater detail, mirrors the improvements that I've been noticing week to week. As far as I'm concerned, this is resuming and increasing my ability to enjoy the Sonos sound that I care about so much. If they can keep going, I see no reason that they can't surpass the user experience that we enjoyed with the old app controller. And that's certainly cause for optimism.

Nobody here argued that "it was good practice for Sonos to release a terribly flawed product".  Talk about an actual strawman.  

Prepare to be publicly flogged and scourged.

I’d be very interested to understand why you think the change from upnp (which uses ssdp) for device discovery to mDNS would cause speakers not to be found.

I’ve seen numerous times now, posts claiming that the change from ssdp to mDNS is showing flaws in peoples networks that weren’t previously impacting. I’d very much like to understand that, because from what I know about using, running and configuring ssdp and mDNS services, if ssdp previously worked without issues on a typical network then mDNS should, as long as the device and client implementation are correct.

The broadcast addresses for the two protocols are different, so I guess we can’t rule out that routers may not be playing equally nice with the two protocols… Makes me wonder if adding the broadcast addresses manually to the built-in firewalls to allow traffic might help? 

As to the more general point here on patience, normally I’d be inclined to agree, but it’s extremely rare for a company the size of Sonos to suddenly effectively withdraw key function without warning. This isn’t new shiny toys that don’t quite work as expected, this is core function that for long time users is what Sonos was all about. The lack of queue editing (still) is mind boggling as it’s not something that is confined to local library use, it was a key part of Sonos being able to create queues of music from all over the place… I think this then adds salt into the wounds of local library users as the currently really poor local music integration makes things painful in the extreme… 

Sticking with the old S2 app where you can, or using the desktop controllers works to a fashion as long as you don’t need to change the config of your system as then you are forced to update…

So then you’re stuck in a weird limbo while you hope & pray that Sonos sort this mess out. Whilst I have no interest in the new headphones, I was contemplating a sub-mini to bolster a pair of Sonos One’s. I was also considering an Era 100 to replace an aging Play:3. Not any more as I’d rather stay as is than have to suffer more, so Sonos is already losing revenue that would probably exceed a new pair of headphones in the short to medium term.