Sonos App

Hi Edward R.

The Sonos app for Mac is one of the most infuriating apps I have ever used in my life. Sure, examples can be given, but where do you start? Sure, there are thousands of people using the app. I’m one of them. But I wouldn’t say I don’t have any issues, there are loads. I just haven’t been bothered to report it until now because there are some workarounds to sort of make it do what you want it to do. Today I decided to google “why is sonos mac app so bad” and I came across this thread and decided to chime in. Also, I think all sorts of profanity is warranted when expressing the frustration this app causes, but I’m going to refrain from using it because you clearly take issue with it.

I cannot disagree any more with what chicks and Smilja said about it doing exactly what it’s intended to do, that it’s a remote control and that it’s not outdated and feels and flows just like any other music app. It’s the worst remote control I’ve ever used in my life.

Actually, the Sonos app does not feel like a native Mac application at all. Try using something like Spotify or Apple Music on a Mac and you’ll get an idea of how an application should feel.

Here’s a very very basic example that you would expect would have been fairly straightforward in 2020. I want to listen to specific song in Spotify and add it to my queue, then I want to add a few more songs.

I search for Goldfrapp Ocean, because the artist is Goldfrapp and the name of the song is called Ocean. I get the message: “Search returned no results for ‘goldfrapp ocean’ in Artists. Please try a different category or a new search term.”

Ok, not quite fair enough, but in this terrible application you have to click over to Songs to find this specific song, so I click the Songs category. Now I get the message: “Search returned no results for ‘goldfrapp ocean’ in Songs. Please try a different category or a new search term.”

Hmm.. Ok, let’s try and remove Goldfrapp from the search. Now lots of songs are showing up, but not the one I wanted. Let’s try and add Goldfrapp at the end of the search. Bingo… I’ve found the song. But should I really have to go through this to find a song?

I add the song to my queue. But I want to add another song to it, which in my opinion should be fairly straightforward to do. Sparing you from my music interest, I go through the hoops again and finally find the next song, I grab the song and drag it to the queue below the current track. It randomly (this doesn’t happen all the time) adds the song above the one currently playing. I try to grab it to pull it down below that one, but the app is frozen.. Then a little message pops up saying “One track added to the queue” and I can’t do anything until that has gone away. And when it goes away the whole application just flashes and redraws the whole view. Annoying? Yeah.

So I have added a bunch of songs to my queue and I’m at the point where they can’t all fit in the view that I’m in, so I leave the app for a second (because I need to use Spotify to find songs since the Sonos app is so bad at searching) and when I come back and I want to add another song, I cannot scroll through the queue, it’s just stuck. If I grab another song and move it towards the queue, it sort of unfreezes and lets me move around it in while still holding on to the song. But really?

So yeah, adding a bunch of songs to a queue is super annoying and really hard work.

I am not surprised the app is not in the App Store, because if it was, the ratings would have been so terrible.

BTW, I’ve been using this app for a few years now on many different computers and many different versions of MacOS and it’s always been like this. The app for the phone works a bit better, but it’s still not great, it comes with its own issues + the weird counterintuitive search.

So those are the issues that I personally would like assistance with. Not sure about the op.

Edward R and SONOS,

If I can add my two cents, the SONOS App interface with Apple Music is terrible.  Have brought this up on the forum many times, to deaf ears.  The menu is very restricted and outdated as compared to Apple Music on virtually any other device.  It reflects Apple Music as it was back in 2015.  At this point, I have to assume it reflects the inability of all current SONOS hardware to be updated, otherwise why would this be left as is?  And yes, I know the immediate response will be - this is Apple’s responsibility, they must update their app using SONOS’s provided API, but that is a terrible cop out.  Many services besides Apple Music seem to either not update their interfaces on SONOS, or make them overly simplified, and I truly think SONOS has not admitted that their commitment to older and now outdated hardware has prevented such updates.

With everything that has gone down recently, I sincerely hope that SONOS will be motivated, now that it is leaving behind outdated underpowered hardware, to update in a timely fashion its interfaces with Apple Music, Spotify, etc.  

Otherwise, I do fear that SONOS is becoming, and will continue to become, increasingly irrelevant in the current wireless speaker and music streaming reality.