Sonos controller update loses MacOS library access - again!

  • 25 September 2023
  • 6 replies
  • 153 views
C
Userlevel 1
Badge +3

Once again the Sonos controller update on my Aple M.2 Mac mini/Ventura OS has caused the controller to lose access to the music library. The music library’s  access location has not changed amd I’, cross as hell at the prospect of updating the iTunes library details for this witless controller. So I am playing my music to my Sonos 3 and 5 speakers by using Apple Airplay on my iPhone. Why the heck do I keep the Sonos Controller when all I want to do is play music library tracks on the speakers and the darn controller keeps on losing access after the far-too-common updates? Come on Sonos. It’s been months since the Apple M2 Mini and Ventura were releassed. Get your act together.

I’m already using an Apple HomePod speaker in a second home where Sonos controller updates on a MacBook Air M.1/Ventura kept losing access to the MacBook Air’s music library. The HomePod’s sound quality is as good as the Sonos 1’s I’ve previously been using. That means I’ll get another AirPod there for stereo access, and Sonos loses the otherwise dependable Sonos 1 speaker pair upgrade.

If this controller issue isn’t fixed I’ll get pairs of HomePods for my main home and Sonos will lose the Sonos 3 and 5 upgrades there as well. Then it will lose the Playbar TV speaker update and so on. I’m utterly furious about this issue and refuse to reset the controller’s music library details; removing the current liubrary and adding a new one which references the exact same iTunes library as before. It’s simply too frustrating to keep on doing this. Enough already. Get your darn act together or lose me as a customer.

And, I suspect, I’m not alone.

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6 replies

Corry P
Userlevel 7
Badge +18

Hi @ChrisMellor 

Thanks for your post!

You shouldn’t need to change any settings - they are stored by the speakers, not by the app. It is possible, however, that the Sonos Library Service isn’t running on your computer. To find out, please do the following:

 

  1. Search for and launch Activity Monitor.
  2. Select View from top menu and select All Processes,
  3. Then search for Sonos. The SonosLibraryServer should appear.

If it is not shown there, please uninstall the Sonos app, then remove the following folders/files (“~” denotes your user home folder):

  1. ~/Library/Application Support/Sonos
  2. ~/Library/Preferences/com.sonos.macController.plist
  3. ~/Library/Application Support/Sonos/SonosLibraryServer
  4. /Users/Shared/Sonos/Shares.plist

Once done, please install the Sonos app from https://support.sonos.com/downloads

Please note that there are many possible reasons as to why indexing of your music library may fail, and the above is just a educated guess on my part. If you continue to have issues, I recommend you get in touch with our technical support team who have tools at their disposal that will allow them to give you advice specific to your Sonos system and what it reports. The reports from the speakers are invaluable in this situation.

I hope this helps.

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." - Albert Einstein
C
Userlevel 1
Badge +3

Corry, Are you kidding? There are more than 50 active processes in my Mac and the list is constantly changing. You suggest I delete four specific folders, delete the Sonos cntroller app, download and reinstall it, hook it up to all my speakers, have it catalog my iTunes library and then I hopefully will be good to go an hour or so after starting this re-installation.  A simpler process is to remove the current music library from the Sonos Music Library settings and then simply add it back again, then wait while it recatalogs the iTunes library. This is a bullet-proof procedure - and has just worked.

I shouldn’t have to do any of this. My complaint is effectively a bug report. It should, I think, be passed to the Sonos support team and a process put in place to acknowledge it and fix it. Instead you suggest a remediation procedure that is more complex and takes longer than the remediation feature I complained about in the first place!

There is obviously a bug in the Sonos controller upgrade process. I’ll try the Sonos technical support team route. 

C
Userlevel 1
Badge +3

The Sonos technical support chatbot is an idiot by the way!

Corry P
Userlevel 7
Badge +18

Hi @ChrisMellor 

The number of running processes on your Mac is irrelevant - once you search for “Sonos”, only two are going to show in the list, but that is now beside the point. I was attempting to help you find out what the underlying issue was, rather than just give you advice you’ve seen and followed before. If it had turned out to be the service not running after the update that was causing the problem, that would have been something solid for me to report back to my colleagues. Considering that you were able to resolve the issue without a reinstall, however, it’s possible that the service was in fact running and I was barking up the wrong tree anyway. It depends on the subsystem used though - we’ll initially try to use HTTP and the running service to get access to the files. If that fails, we use SMB/CIFS instead - to know why you had the issue, we need to know which method was in use in the first place.

To have a potential bug investigated, we need to have thorough troubleshooting and diagnostics performed, and as you have already resolved the issue, this can no longer be done - at least for now. All I can therefore suggest is that if this happens again, you get in touch with our technical support team before resolving it, and being sure to express that you know how to fix it but that you are reporting that there is an issue manifesting after you update. The diagnostics taken before the issue is fixed would be instrumental in understanding the issue.

I’m not sure how a call to support will go if you’ve already fixed the problem - I recommend not doing so as you will likely just get more frustrated trying to convince someone of a bug when you’ve already fixed it.

I will see if I can get a colleague to try and recreate the issue, but considering there aren’t hundreds of other users reporting the same issue after every update, I have to assume for the moment that the issue is particular to your computer/system, and therefore not a bug in the software.

I hope this helps.

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." - Albert Einstein
Corry P
Userlevel 7
Badge +18

Hi @ChrisMellor 

The Sonos technical support chatbot is an idiot by the way!

It’s just there to try to filter out some of the more common issues so that those customers who need to do more troubleshooting than simply turning one or two things off and on again are more likely to have agents available to speak to them in a timely manner. It’s not equipped to deal with potential bug reports.

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." - Albert Einstein
Corry P
Userlevel 7
Badge +18

Hi @ChrisMellor 

My colleague tried to reproduce your issue but was unable to do so. It therefore seems most likely that the issue is restricted to being on your setup alone, for some reason. I recommend you get in touch with our technical support team who have tools at their disposal that will allow them to give you advice specific to your Sonos system and what it reports.

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." - Albert Einstein
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