Why have I have lost access to my music library on both Sonos S1 and S2 products?

The Emperor’s New Clothes and the BBC TV sitcom “Yes Minister” come to mind.

I have been an early adopter of SONOS, initially purchasing Gen1 Play 5 and Play 3 as both stereo pairs, then play bar and sub and play1s. 

Extremely disappointed with SONOS when they tried to force purchases of GEN2 products by bricking GEN1 speakers. However on that occasion SONOS responded to customer dissatisfaction by reversing this and allowing GEN1 products to continue working.

Given the expense of SONOS products I would expect that they last at least as long as passive speakers from the days of analog/analogue tech. Not so. Both my Play3s have died and there is no direct or third party repair support from SONOS.

This latest S2 App failure and the failure of SONOS from the CEO down to acknowledge their customers in a respectful manner should be recognised honestly for what it is. SCAM is not too strong a word. 

I am not naive or as credulous as the SONOS CEO or Board seem to think their customers are. Nor am I ignorant of how corporations function. It is common for those who are appointed or promoted to senior positions of management to possess and display political skills, sycophantic and psychopathic qualities in equal measure to incompetence while deflecting blame for failure to those in the organisation with real technical expertise and intelligence whose advice is accepted in direct proportion with how they agree with or not with their employer’s decisions however flawed they may be. No one gets promoted by pointing out that the emperor has no clothes.

It would appear that the only course of action open to SONOS customer base present and future is the mounting of a Class Action. It is apparent that the CEO and Board are disingenuous when they claim that their primary reason d’être is to produce quality audio products and deliver exceptional customer experience. Clearly profit is driving this company above anything else to the extent that the business decisions result in a customer outcome equivalent to theft.

I can only recommend to family, friends and the general public to reject SONOS as a home audio solution and choose a manufacturer that demonstrates ethical behaviour in equal measure to technical proficiency.

It is courageous to admit when one is wrong, it is incompetent to pretend otherwise.

Unfortunately, no luck with the latest update. The iOS app has some of the music library management features back but the only one that seems to work is deleting your shared folders. That worked fine. But now I’m back to where I was 2 months ago...unable to access the music library stored on my NAS drive. My system died the other night and then created multiple instances of imported playlists and albums, some of which were accessible, some were not. I was still able to use the Sonos playlists I created to deal with the missing sleep timer issue but thought I would try deleting my music library and re-adding it to deal with the playlist problems. Well, that was foolish of me. The latest version of the iOS app would not allow me to add a library, so I reverted to the desktop app. It previously allowed me to add my NAS library but now won’t let me add it either in its original location or in the copy I made of it, claiming the NAS is not powered on or the path to the NAS has changed. Neither is the case. I guess it’s back to waiting for Sonos to fix this problem.