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Slowly but surely over the last few years Sonos as a platform has really gone downhill to the point where im considering looking for an alternative to replace my system. Here’s just a few of my gripes:

 

  • The failure to move away from SMB1 and the security flaws therein
  • I’ve moved a pair of Sone Ones from my bedroom to the lounge and renamed them, but every time I go back into the app the speakers rename themselves back to master bedroom
  • Album artwork hardly ever shows in the app
  • Playlists will disappear from view for weeks on end then randomly show up for a couple of days only to disappear again. That’s not specific playlists, it’s the actual playlists section completely disappears from the star section of the app
  • New albums are added to my network share but no matter how many times I update music library they don’t appear, then couple weeks later they’ll magically appear
  • We have a Play 1 in the nursery which plays lullabies to our child at bedtime, the same songs were queued on the device for months and we just had to hit play. Lately pressing play is presented with orange flashing light and we have to keep going into the app and add the lullabies to the queue every night as there are no queued songs. This will happen for a week or two then all of a sudden play button will work again and it remembers what was in the queue

Sonos was once a premium solution but I feel it’s not worth the hassle these days. Not everyone wants to subscribe to Spotify or whatever, I have 1,000s of CDs worth of music ripped on my NAS which was the main reason for gravitating to Sonos in the first place. It seems they don’t care about the collector anymore and are focusing their efforts purely on the streaming side of things.

For info I’ve tried iPhone app, iPad app and desktop app and they are all having the above issues. We have 2 Play 1s, a Play 3 and a paired set of Sonos Ones.

(1) S2 supports SMB2-3, S1 will only support S1 due to hardware constraints.

(2) This is usually a side effect of Alexa. You should use the same name in Alexa

(3) Mine always shows. How is your artwork defined? Is it embedded or supplied an external file? There are time limits for artwork fetching. If there is a timeout, artwork fetch for that element will be aborted.

(4) You should submit a diagnostic immediately after one of these events, then follow up with SONOS support.

(5) Likely, there is an issue with your library. Perhaps a bad file name or too much Metadata. If the indexer encounters an issue it will terminate early. Since the indexer has no control over the order files are presented by the NAS, early termination can occur (resulting in skipped files) at different points in the process. The absolute library limit is 65,000 tracks.

(6) Pay attention to the firmness of your Play button press because the button is multi-function.

Just to pickup quickly on point 2 in @buzz’s post - a device that keeps renaming itself back to its old name is more likely to be as a result of not changing its name in Apple Home(kit), so if using that App also ensure the speaker is first renamed in that App.

One more thing… to keep the nursery lullaby’s held on the speaker - save these as a playlist and perhaps use an Alarm to load and play the tracks at the same time each evening. There are much better ways to do this, without actually having to start playing the tracks, but that requires the use of a 3rd-party App called Soro for use with iOS shortcuts that can load a playlist to s queue using a daily schedule, without starting playback.

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