sonos playlist creation

Hi there,

i just downgraded to S1 and it is such a relief!

best

It’s complete crap that we still can’t edit playlists. This was supposed to have been restored in either September or October and then was pushed to December. Now here we are in the last week of the month and still no resolution.  Sonos is the absolute worst in terms of customer satisfaction.

Have people really now stopped bashing Sonos en masse for its utter failure to implement playlist management via the app? I cannot believe it’s now Jan 11 and I still can’t add any songs to my playlists or create new ones. Absolutely unacceptable and yet we have to accept it. And no, I don’t want to add songs via my MacBook, it’s a hassle to fire it up every time I want to add a song to a playlist, and I don’t have it on me around the house…

Can someone at Sonos say when this is going to be added as I’m starting to worry that it will never reappear and that someone somewhere at Sonos is hoping to just keep their head down and hope this goes away because they’ve realised the new app cannot ever accommodate this functionality….

So when will playlists be back and when can I edit old ones, this is crap. Pay a fortune and can’t do anything with it.

I just chatted with support, they are now saying playlist editing may not be added back to the mobile Sonos app and will only be in the desktop app….  Playlist creation and editing is the main feature I use in the app and this is incredibly disheartening.  I logged a complaint.  Everyone that uses that feature needs to make their voice heard soon or we may not get it back.  

That seems like a substantial shift, can you tell us who told you that? Certainly seems like a misunderstanding to me. 
 

Edit: oh, I see you used the term ‘may’. Seems counter to all the previously published information. 

I’d bet/hope that’s a misinformed agent and couldn’t imagine not being able to edit playlists - and the idea of relying on a pretty static desktop seems far fetched too (even if its very existence has helped many users carry on using their systems in the way they want).

Hopefully ​@Corry P could comment?

Corry P from Sonos, I think many thousands of us are sick and tired of the same old lines and pathetic workarounds that you tell us to utilize.  How about we get some straight answers as to why playlist editing hasn’t been fixed after it was promised in October and then pushed to December?  For the thousands of dollars that nearly all of us have spent on your products, we deserve much better than we’ve gotten.  I am absolutely incensed by the continued ineptitude that Sonos displays on a daily basis.  Your company is a joke!

This has been frustrating for me also, but I found a way to work with what I have. I make and edit the playlist in the music service I'm using. In my case it's Tidal. I then go to Your Services on the home page, select Tidal, My Collection, Playlists, Own Playlists and locate the Playlists I built. This works 'OK' but if you use multiple music services, no help. 

You'd have to build a Playlist in each music service and add each Playlist to the now playing queue.  This can also be done with individual tracks you "favorite" in the music service. The music services have better tools for building Playlists. Forget trying to do it in Sonos.

I also think, but can't say for sure, that you can't dynamically change the Playlist. You can add tracks to the queue while it's playing, but you'll also need to add those separately to the Tidal / Spotify Playlist so they will be there, the next time you select the Playlist. None of this is convenient, but at least I don't need to manually select what I want to play each time. 

I regret having upgraded from S1!

Hi ​@MrCarib56 & @sjw

Apologies - what you were told, you were told in error.

For some reason, the agent you spoke to thought that TBD stands for To Be Decided, when it actually stands for To Be Determined. TBD was next to the ETA of a fix for that particular issue. So, they basically entirely misunderstood the information that they were looking at. The agent will receive feedback concerning this.

I hope this helps.

I have playlists which i can access via the sonophone app, which i have had to use since you released a new app which does less than the previous one. Baffling.

I like many miss the playlist editing function as I have spent countless hours creating playlists for special occasions and or just the mood that I am in at the moment.

Sonos support convinced me to download the desktop app and I have say it is easy to do and the playlist editing function works well and is straightforward.(basically i am now editing my playlists on my windows computer and not my mobile).  Not perfect but an easy fix until the mobile functionality comes back. 

I also spent hours on playlists, but don't have a desktop. I suppose the question that needs answering definitively is, when will it be reintroduced to the app?

Corry,

 Is it possible for you to get permission from someone to tell us the new ETA? 

If not then it would be useful for some from the developer side to come and explain why the new design of this feature is proving so difficult to replicate in the new App.

As someone else mentioned , to have a date of Oct published and then December and then nothing doesn’t fill anyone with confidence. 

(my guess would be its something to do with the large volume of data that would be required by the new cloud app service in order for playlists to be displayed & controlled. Its probably too large for the cloud to request the detail from your player each and every time which would likely make it slow and unresponsive). 

This must be one of the top features people want restored to the app and I cant comprehend the reluctance to be open about it. 

Hi ​@Editor & ​@giffo333 

I can’t give you a specific ETA, but this feature should be returning in one of the immediately immanent updates (as in, the next update, or the one after that).

I hope this helps.

and so in the meantime can we get a developer to explain why this has been such a difficult issue to resolve?  

I’ll note that I still have access to all of my SONOS playlists created prior to the May update when I use the Windows desktop controller. I realize this info is not immediately useful info for anyone without access to a desktop controller. The good news is that eventually your old playlists will be back. The playlist data has not been destroyed because it is stored in the players, not the controllers.

Hi ​@Editor 

In short, no.

I would not know who to ask, just for starters.

hi ​@giffo333 & ​@buzz 

The very helpful support person only confirmed what is mentioned above that the update for playlist editing is coming shortly but didnt have any more info.

I still have access via mobile to my original playlists and now with the desktop controller they can and are being updated ‘real’ time so I am relatively relaxed(again realize it is not helpful if you dont have a desktop)

I can tell you the opposite: I can tell you it’s not that hard, working on my own Sonos app.

A few weeks ago I added “save queue as playlist”, took me 2 weekends. I had the underlying code in my older apps, had to do some new UX which always takes me ages, and had to fix some gaps in the newer codebase.

Next I have been adding “add track to sonos playlist”. I didn’t have any older code to fallback on, so had to figure out the basics of the API first. The initial work was last weekend, and this weekend I’ll be tidying up the UX and doing some more testing.

Me, a dude in my garage, without any API documentation, can implement this stuff in a few weekends, and get that code running on PC, Android, iOS and Mac. The fact the official apps have taken 9 months to NOT do this work is mind boggling to me. I am beginning to wonder if this is deliberate - per the post above, maybe Sonos playlists really are going away when the desktop apps are retired?

Oh damn sure hope not. 

That would be completely the opposite of what Corry announced above. So I don’t think he would have done so, if there were any plans to remove Sonos playlists. 

The more I see it the more I think that the new App (or at least large parts of its functional modules) was farmed out and coded largely by an external company with little knowledge of how the existing/old underlying system and app works/worked.  I have no basis of fact here but it just seems the most obvious reason.

I can't recall the name (I think it was Nick Millington) but I recall they went right back to basics early on and the ‘head of’ the initial Sonos implementation and architecture came back in to troubleshoot what was going wrong and why - and to ‘fix’ it.

It is astonishing that the functionality that was there from day one was not only not in the relaunch but is still missing 8+ months on - in a company the size of Sonos.  Although due to the number of monumental cock ups the company is, sadly, now quite a bit smaller than it was pre-new App launch. ☹️

I believe he wouldn’t have done so on purpose. But don’t think he would necessarily know if decision makers decided to remove this