I have just transferred my personal music library from Google Play Music to YouTube Music. After adding YouTube Music to my Sonos app I was horrified to find that I can no longer play my personal music library unless I am prepared to use the ‘Premium’ version of YouTube music. What is going on here and who’s responsible? I had no problem playing music from my personal music library from Google Play Music on my Sonos.
This topic has been closed for further comments. You can use the search bar to find a similar topic, or create a new one by clicking Create Topic at the top of the page.
Page 2 / 2
It's a sad backward step.
NAS drive seems a good option - but they're not cheap are they?
I notice the app Sonostube lets you cast YouTube videos to listen to the audio on Sonos. Don't know if there's a way of getting at one's private uploads to YouTube that way?
Probably not.
I’m in the same situation. I realise that Sonos is not responsible for what Google or YouTube choose to do, but it is responsible for the services it offers.
I purchased a Sonos system specifically to enable streaming of my own personal music library which I have uploaded to the cloud over many years and keep up to date regularly. It seems I’m not the only one. The reason I want to do it via the cloud is that this allows me to use services other than Sonos, eg, in the car.
Sonos now has no service which allows me to do this. Yes, I could pay for a music streaming service that I don’t want, just to enable the access to my own music, but that would defeat the objective. I am happy that I contribute enough to the music industry by buying physical copies of all my music.
Unless I am missing something? I had a look at Plex but that seemed to just enable streaming from my own PC.
Wish I’d looked at this stream sooner. Just fallen into the same trap. Like everyone else, I’m not going to be strong-armed into shelling out for a Premium account just to play music I’ve already paid for.
Goodbye Google/YTM.
Wish I’d looked at this stream sooner. Just fallen into the same trap. Like everyone else, I’m not going to be strong-armed into shelling out for a Premium account just to play music I’ve already paid for.
Goodbye Google/YTM.
What’s your plan Baz?
I’m in the same situation. I realise that Sonos is not responsible for what Google or YouTube choose to do, but it is responsible for the services it offers.
I purchased a Sonos system specifically to enable streaming of my own personal music library which I have uploaded to the cloud over many years and keep up to date regularly. It seems I’m not the only one. The reason I want to do it via the cloud is that this allows me to use services other than Sonos, eg, in the car.
Sonos now has no service which allows me to do this. Yes, I could pay for a music streaming service that I don’t want, just to enable the access to my own music, but that would defeat the objective. I am happy that I contribute enough to the music industry by buying physical copies of all my music.
Unless I am missing something? I had a look at Plex but that seemed to just enable streaming from my own PC.
Any idea how to make sure someone from Sonos sees this? The Sonos service is downgraded by this change. They could do something about it.
Hopefully both Sonos and YTM will (or already have) realise it's in both their interests to allow Sonos and Google to carry on as before and allow users to stream their own content to their speakers and they'll have some dialogue to resolve this.
Don't dismiss the power of individual feedback either though.
How do we feed back though, other than noising off here? Sonos have made it incredibly difficult to email them.
YTM is a complete rip off … does anyone here know how to download music out of you tube music? .. google music manager appears defunct
thanks
Lets get real here: Google are an advertising company, period. They were losing money on Google Play Music, and it didn’t do anything for their ad revenue, so they decided to kill it, and send folks to YTM which does generate ad revenue.
The number of ways of playing your personal connection from the cloud has been tending to zero over the years, as it costs money to run the service but no-one wants to pay for it. There was Groove, Amazon, Google, probably others. All gone now.
Sonos can’t do any more about this than they can get Spotify to order their playlists sanely, or Apple to include every album under My Music. In fact less than this, as at least Sonos can ask them to fix these things: Sonos can hardly be expected to ask Google to not delete Play Music.
If you want to play your personal music files on you Sonos, do it locally, there are many ways of doing that.
Couldn’t Sonos develop and operate their own cloud-based player? There’s a difference here between “nothing they can do” and “nothing they will do”. At the time of Sonos selling their product to me at a cost of several thousand pounds, a certain service was available, my reason for getting involved as it happens, which isn’t any longer.
To be clear, I'm not suggesting at all that Sonos could ask Google not to delete Play Music.
They can of course have many discussions on whether it will be replaced by an equivalent replacement and what it could mean for them.
As can the users.
I work for a large corporation who are currently switching across to G Suite from M$ and in addition to the ongoing dialogue that the company has, it's made very clear that anybody can (and are encouraged to) click that Feedback button and the more that do it the more focus it may get.
Userlevel 7
+23
Couldn’t Sonos develop and operate their own cloud-based player? There’s a difference here between “nothing they can do” and “nothing they will do”. At the time of Sonos selling their product to me at a cost of several thousand pounds, a certain service was available, my reason for getting involved as it happens, which isn’t any longer.
Why would Sonos want to get into the cloud-player business? There is no money to be had (cf. all the dead services) and its a legal nightmare (albeit technically pretty straight-forward). Their remain many ways of playing local files, although that is an ever-diminishing user scenario.
When I bought my first Sonos gear there wasn’t a cloud, all my music was on my PC, and it worked great. In fact that still works great. Then Pandora came out, and that still works (mostly as great). Now they support ~70 different music services, which is fantastic.
Google kill products all the time, its not very wise to rely on their “free” stuff long term, unless it generates significant ad revenue.
Couldn’t Sonos develop and operate their own cloud-based player?
They could, if they thought that there was sufficient profit in it… How much are you willing to pay for it? And can you find a few hundred thousand other people also willing to stump up the monthly fee?
At the time of Sonos selling their product to me at a cost of several thousand pounds, a certain service was available, my reason for getting involved as it happens, which isn’t any longer.
The service was provided by a third party, which Sonos kit enabled access to. The third party has now deleted the service - how is this the fault of Sonos?
Couldn’t Sonos develop and operate their own cloud-based player? There’s a difference here between “nothing they can do” and “nothing they will do”. At the time of Sonos selling their product to me at a cost of several thousand pounds, a certain service was available, my reason for getting involved as it happens, which isn’t any longer.
Why would Sonos want to get into the cloud-player business? There is no money to be had (cf. all the dead services) and its a legal nightmare (albeit technically pretty straight-forward). Their remain many ways of playing local files, although that is an ever-diminishing user scenario.
When I bought my first Sonos gear there wasn’t a cloud, all my music was on my PC, and it worked great. In fact that still works great. Then Pandora came out, and that still works (mostly as great). Now they support ~70 different music services, which is fantastic.
Google kill products all the time, its not very wise to rely on their “free” stuff long term, unless it generates significant ad revenue.
I don’t fully disagree, I’m just a bit miffed personally! “Why would Sonos want to get into the cloud player business?” - well, only from some old-fashioned notion of customer service and product improvement for their customers, I agree it’s not compatible with raw capitalism.
Regarding local solutions then, which I accept I’m going to have to get into, have you any advice for me? I’m a music lover, not a tech lover, and I must admit that most of the solutions I have seen described look intimidating. Other than WD My Cloud Home, but then that kind of looks like I’d be over-spending maybe? And then what happens when Sonos remove that from their services list/WD withdraw it?
Thanks for the discussion and thanks in advance for any help.
Couldn’t Sonos develop and operate their own cloud-based player?
They could, if they thought that there was sufficient profit in it… How much are you willing to pay for it? And can you find a few hundred thousand other people also willing to stump up the monthly fee?
At the time of Sonos selling their product to me at a cost of several thousand pounds, a certain service was available, my reason for getting involved as it happens, which isn’t any longer.
The service was provided by a third party, which Sonos kit enabled access to. The third party has now deleted the service - how is this the fault of Sonos?
See my reply to Controlav - I would see it as an enabler to the profit they get on their hardware, just as access to Google Play Music was. But anyway, I know it wont happen, I was using it as an example of the difference between “can’t” and “wont”.
I’m a music lover, not a tech lover, and I must admit that most of the solutions I have seen described look intimidating. Other than WD My Cloud Home, but then that kind of looks like I’d be over-spending maybe? And then what happens when Sonos remove that from their services list/WD withdraw it?
Just use any suitable NAS (it must support SMB1) and run your music from there… It partly depends on how much music you have - if you don’t have much then it could fit onto a USB stick that you may be able to plug into your router. Or, if you need more space, then a USB hard drive could also be plugged in to your router. Obviously, there could be an impact on performance, so a NAS is the better solution. I have other NAS devices available for my main data and as backups to my Sonos NAS, which is a fairly cheap LG device. This has been running 24x7 for over nine years so far - so the overall cost has been about £10 pa.
Sonos are unlikely to remove local access support, but they haven’t improved it for years.
Personally, I don’t use streaming services and only use local music, and lock down my system so that Sonos can’t accidentally ‘improve’ it and thereby mess something else up.
Thanks. I don’t know what NAS is, I don’t know what SMB1 is, and I dont know what “run your music from there” means in practical terms. So you see my problem.
Haven’t counted lately, but I’m guessing about 20000 songs.
Obviously I’m being a bit flippant - I can google and work out what NAS and SMB1 are - but I really am struggling with “run your music from there”.
And of course, it’s not your job to educate me! This is why I’m banging on - where is Sonos customer support and service in all of this? I could make another expensive mistake.
Anyway, I really do appreciate the help. You can probably sense that I’m just a frustrated individual who’s out of his depth technically and just wants to listen to music, around the home, easily. I guess the mistake was getting Sonos in the first place.
I just transferred my GPM library and was shocked to see that premium is required for YouTube Music, so no thanks.
Also just read that YouTube Music only streams at 128, with 256 option for premium.
I’ll stick with my Amazon Music HD, but sucks that I won’t be able to play local library via GPM after this year.
My own music uploaded from google play.
thanks
paul s
Look at it this way. How much influence does Apple or IBM (do they still make PCs?) have on Google’s choices? Sonos is a hardware maker. They provide an API for other companies to use the platform to connect to their services, but Sonos doesn’t charge anything, nor pay anything to provide those services. Check Sonos’ annual report, you’ll see the only income and expenses are based in Sonos, and not any agreements or income from other companies, other than licensing agreements from those who have attempted and failed to steal the patents (see Denon and BlueSound).
In fact, Sonos is currently suing Google for patent infringement, and Google has countersued, for whatever that is worth.
But Sonos only makes their money from selling you hardware, not by any subscriptions or free services that they connect to. So, Sonos is motivated to make their platform as diverse as possible by allowing as many companies as possible access to the API, so that the stream will play on they’re hardware, so more people will purchase their hardware. On the other hand, since there is no payment occurring between Sonos and any of the providers, they’ve got no particular leverage in how that company decides to monetize their user base.
At most, I assume they go to the company and say “hey, we represent X number of streams to your service annually, and a small percentage of people in our forums are complaining about the fact that you’re getting rid of free access’. To which the management at Google probably says ‘reduced costs for free stuff is good, more revenue for subscriptions is better’. But Sonos has zero control over that process. And generally speaking, individual users feedback carries more weight than the more random and not verifiable feedback from a company like Sonos.
I would love it if I believed Sonos had any input into these decisions, but I don’t. Much like when I worked for a game company who provided Facebook games. Other than following the API provided by Facebook for account interaction, they had zero input in to gameplay.
But, this is merely my perspective, from years of business experience in related industries. I don’t work for Sonos, nor am I in their corporate decision making process. But I do think your complaints will be more effective when made to YouTube/Google, than it ever will being filtered through the lens of Sonos.
I don’t expect Sonos to have any clout with Google, ive never said I expected them to somehow make any difference to what Google does.
…..but I really am struggling with “run your music from there”.
You load your music onto the NAS device, which is usually powered on all the time. You use the controller to tell the Sonos hardware what to play and it streams it from the NAS device. You don’t need internet access for this or for any third party provider. It is totally under your control what’s available.
…..just wants to listen to music, around the home, easily. I guess the mistake was getting Sonos in the first place.
I don’t see why - this is exactly what Sonos is good at
Thanks amun and others. I’ve had my moan, now I’ll just have to get on with finding a solution. Cheers.
Sadly while I can Chromecast my transferred YT personal music library to my Google Devices my Sonos speakers no longer show up. So basically that's the end of personal streaming of my music library.
I hate You Tube Music.
First, it’s nowhere as easy to use as Google Play Music and the only way to play my music on Sonos is to pay for it.
Here’s where it gets worse:
While all of my music is in the YouTube app on my phone, only artists A-C are showing up in You Tube Music in my Sonos app, which means I have only a small portion of my music!
I called Sonos and they are contacting You Tube. They said they have had similar complaints.
You Tube does not take customer service calls and has yet to respond by email after I contacted them more than a week ago.
What a cluster %#}}% !!!
Youtube music on sonos is absolutly horrible. Its a mess. Your uploaded tracks are all in alphabetical order in the artist section. You can’t listen to any particular album by an artists if you have multiple albums by that artist. The best music app for sonos is Amazon. EVERYTHING is in alphabetical order, All my music ithat I own is on my hard drive so I’ll just use the sonos app for that. I hate YOUTUBE MUSIC. I cancelled my subscription. Spotify only shows albums and not artist on Sonos.
do you know if you can cast from Amazon app (on android) to Sonos players .. thats my main requirement, any local device on the network can cast to a Sonos with its own music players account, not trigger music from the Sonos app itself (which is a bad experience)
just terminated TY music family account as its just soo fail. GPM was generally ok
Page 2 / 2
Enter your username or e-mail address. We'll send you an e-mail with instructions to reset your password.