Difficulty moving music from Room A to Room B

For some reason Sonos don't appear to respond to this particular issue (or many others lately) except ones to tell dozens of users their previously fine systems are experiencing wireless interference. I'd bet pretty much all users could submit a diagnostic and there would be a level of interference - but that doesn't mean it's the cause of their problems.
There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of problems with the app:
1. People not able to use it because it is new to them and it takes time to understand it and then get habituated to the new way of doing things.
2. People not able to use the app because the update process has created/unearthed IP address conflicts and the system is, in effect, broken.
Sonos rarely responds to category 1 posts, unless to say feedback noted, and replies to as many of category 2 as possible. Not all of these, and their response time has suffered and needs to improve, but the difference between 1 and 2 is an important one because response levels to category 1 will not change, from what has been seen for years now.
My guess to the reason for drop in response rate to category 2 is because of increase in support needs everywhere for the parallel Alexa integration. Management should have anticipated this and ramped up resources till things stabilised, no doubt. Or should have made no changes to the app until the Alexa integration had been stabilised.

1. People not able to use it because it is new to them and it takes time to understand it and then get habituated to the new way of doing things.

Or much more likely: people having trouble using it, because the new design is a lot less intuitive and efficient than the previous one.

This rooms issue is as an excellent case in point. You could use it in the previous version, it still works like that in Spotify, and yet - even though no one ever complained about it - the functionality was removed in 8.x.

You can't blame your customers for that. It's just bad product design and management. And yes, most companies do struggle to admit that.

Or much more likely: people having trouble using it, because the new design it's a lot less intuitive and efficient than the previous one.

IMO, that happens even with me every time Sonos makes a change in the UI and I have never seen any reason for any of the changes made. But that seems to be fashionable these days, so I have learnt to live with that. And going by history, when the next major change is done in a year or so from now, that one will seem a lot less intuitive than this one.

Thankfully in my case, I use the desktop controller more often and that has remained essentially unchanged for years now and I hope that state will continue in future.

Purely my personal opinion. I have found the app works well for me if I go through the tab bar for everything. It took me ten minutes of playing with thee app to decide that.

I am not here to defend the app or Sonos. Just saying what makes life easier for me.

OK well that's fine but you didn't say that before, you said the room button is the way the app is supposed to be used. This is somewhat different to saying this is your preferred method.No I am absolutely saying that whatever Sonos intended the red room thing to do (and I am not sure what that is) it doesn't work as reliably as the Rooms tab, nor is it as fully functional. I suspect it was designed to be a quick method for adding further rooms to the one currently playing. I do know that I, personally, cannot do what I want to reliably using it, and I, personally, don't have that problem with the Rooms screen.

Here are a couple of further observations on transferring music from one room to another.
1. The new feature using the physical buttons on the speakers is easier than any app. Many people seem to missed this. I just pause the speaker in room A using the physical button. Walk to Room B, LONG press on play on the speaker in room B. Job done.
2. Even using the Rooms screen to transfer music has one feature / bug that I find irritating. Even though the music itself is transferred successfully every time, control in the app is not always passed to the new Room. So the music is playing in Room B and you look at the controller and it is still showing Room A. It seems a bit unpredictable, although control seems to be passed more often if you untick Room A before ticking Room B But I have just got into the habit of tapping the new room after clicking 'Done', to make sure I have control over the right room.

Now, let me say one more thing before you all say 'but it shouldn't be necessary to figure all this out'. I agree. I am not trying to defend the app. But right here and now it is what we have all got, and I am just sharing things that have worked for me in the hope that they might help you too. If they do, great. If not, then sorry to have wasted your time. I am not trying to persuade you that you are wrong about the app, just trying to help.

On this particular issue:

- would someone still have a system with 7.4 controller app? Could you take a screen capture video/screenshots of the rooms control on the Now Playing screen?

I can't seem to find a video showing how you move the queue to another roomu, and can't remember how it worked on android app. Was there a 'Now playing in: ' displayed and when you tapped on that you got to the group/ungroup screen? With that it was possible to move the music queue to the other room (you unselect/select).

- I regularly move the music queue from one room to another, so if the red thing worked flawlessly it would be just what I need. My Connect is behind closed door in a closet so physically pressing the button is not feasible.

There needs to be an easy, working, way to move the music queue - and the UI correctly - to another room. The red thing is needed.

Right now the most reliable way to do that is via the Rooms tab. That tab may have been intended only as a way to group/ungroup zones - and not directly to move the queue. The red in the Now Playing would be the fastest way to move the queue but like many have noticed the UI just does not work reliably.

Others with darker UI have solved moving the music (and thus the queue) e.g. with an arrow icon that I instantly figured what it must do. And it did. You just selected the room where you wanted the music queue to play. You could group on that same screen.

While I know how to use the new UI, I really miss the dark UI when I see it in youtube videos 🙂

On this particular issue:

- would someone still have a system with 7.4 controller app? Could you take a screen capture video/screenshots of the rooms control on the Now Playing screen?

I can't seem to find a video showing how you move the queue to another roomu, and can't remember how it worked on android app. Was there a 'Now playing in: ' displayed and when you tapped on that you got to the group/ungroup screen? With that it was possible to move the music queue to the other room (you unselect/select).


Found this on you tube
https://youtu.be/GnVU7Ulzeb0

On this particular issue:

- would someone still have a system with 7.4 controller app? Could you take a screen capture video/screenshots of the rooms control on the Now Playing screen?

I can't seem to find a video showing how you move the queue to another roomu, and can't remember how it worked on android app. Was there a 'Now playing in: ' displayed and when you tapped on that you got to the group/ungroup screen? With that it was possible to move the music queue to the other room (you unselect/select).


Found this on you tube
https://youtu.be/GnVU7Ulzeb0

Many thanks! My googling skills did not find that.

I used to move the music queue by:
1. Tapped at the top like in that video (JEFF’S OFFICE) at 4:09.
2. Then tapped Group, selected Room B and unselected Room A and tapped Done -> the queue would move and Now Playing screen would change to Room B. It was nice.

Now (because of error with the red indicator not working properly):
1. Swipe down/tap near the cue at the top
2. Tap on Rooms tab [focus is on the tab you were before going to Now Playing screen, e.g. in Search]
3. Tap Group, select Room B and unselect Room A and tap Done (now wait longer than in previous version for the UI to refresh and become responsive, on average it now takes 8 seconds for me)
4. Double tap on Room B in the Rooms tab -> now I’m back to the Now Playing screen and can control the queue in Room B. Not as nice.

It will get easier to navigate as announced when:
- that error gets fixed
- the UI starts working much faster overall

I’m hoping for a quick next release of the app.

Thanks for the reports everyone, we're happy to look into this with you.

You should be able to unselect a room using the quick group menu and then select a new room and have the music move from one room to the other. The app should update the rooms selected with the change in music, though this may take longer than the transfer of music itself. There's more going on behind the scenes than you'd see on the app, and the final state of things take a couple handshakes before they reach your app. If the app is having any latency or communication issues to the players, the commands may take too long to send out, or might not reach the players, which could cause the sort of trouble you're describing.

I've tested it out and you can either deselect the active room and then choose the new one first, or select both and then deselect the one you don't want to play in. If you're having trouble using one route vs the other, can you let us know which one?

I'd love to see some diagnostics from your systems just after you try this out to see how the network looks. Can you follow the steps here to submit a diagnostic from your Sonos system and post your confirmation number? We may be able to clean up the environment here to make this work better. On top of that, if there is an issue we can fix here, those diagnostics are really great to pass on to the team.

Hi Ryan,

Thank you for taking the time to check back on the forum.

I hope the following helps debugging and I'm interested in learning if I have problems in my setup.
I have an open question on that, reference: 171201-002723

I have trouble on using both methods. The first move succeeds but the move after that fails every time especially if I have not done anything in between. So, for me easy to reproduce both on Android app and iPad app.

Error #1: using the red quick group menu:

I've submitted diagnostics under: 8175909 for the error I described latest in this thread.

It also happened that the UI didn't update with any info about the record, or the room - I did the same steps, and the output is a slight variation of the error. Diagnostics are under 8175903 - I guess they'll show you similar info(?)

Those happened on Android app, running on Samsung Note 8.

I can also reproduce it on the iPad app.

Error #2: using the Rooms screen:
Same as error #1, i.e. music moves but old Room is focused (i.e. dark background), and new Room shows the music animation as music plays in it.

Error #3: using the Rooms screen:
There is an error that just the Group icon does not move in that screen every time. The music moves and the new Room is focused (i.e. with dark background) on Rooms screen but the Group icon is not on that control. I've seen this error only once so this is hard to reproduce.

It may be latency related as it seems the UI will lose track of the active Room. The error also occurs if I do the first move with the red quick group but move the music back from Rooms - or vice versa.

If it's not my system setup, then maybe it gets confused if it receives those messages in quick succession? Or the UI expects to receive something else in between?

It sounds like the handshake etc. may have been modified compared to the last version. I see quite a few people having problems with intermittent cut off of music (my friend is experiencing such), controllers losing devices: if the messaging has been adjusted could some music/source related messages be timeouting now and that causing also those issues in their network if their network is not optimal?

Thanks.

Thanks for the reports everyone, we're happy to look into this with you.

You should be able to unselect a room using the quick group menu and then select a new room and have the music move from one room to the other. The app should update the rooms selected with the change in music, though this may take longer than the transfer of music itself. There's more going on behind the scenes than you'd see on the app, and the final state of things take a couple handshakes before they reach your app. If the app is having any latency or communication issues to the players, the commands may take too long to send out, or might not reach the players, which could cause the sort of trouble you're describing.
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