Synology NAS compatibility

I am sure the NAS would be fine.  As far as Sonos is concerned it is little more than a hard drive with folders.  There would be file sharing permissions to create but it would surely be possible.  I have a Synology NAS myself, although a different model.

The SACD disks might be a problem though.  Certainly Sonos didn’t support that format in the past, and i doubt that is changed.  If you can rip to FLAC format, say, you would be able to play them.  Whether anything better than that is possible, I don’t know.

Thanks John that gives me a lot more confidence around the NAS. 
Luckily I don’t have many SACD CDs and from memory they’re all hybrids so I should be able to rip to FLAC. 
Just out of curiosity, is there an external CD reader that you’d recommend for ripping my CDs with? I thought to use DB PowerAmp software. 

Because you are using the Sonos S1 App with your devices, I don’t think that NAS supports SMB v1 (which is used by S1 for the library share) straight ‘out the box’, but there maybe the option to enable it.

Note however there are some security concerns with SMB v1, which you can perhaps look at via a search online.

I did come across this workaround link in the Synology community…

https://community.synology.com/enu/forum/20/post/139200

which mentions this…

"NTLMv1 is disabled in DSM 7.0 for security concerns, and only NTLMv2 is supported by default. If an SMB client, such as Windows XP, 2003, media player, network printer, samrt TV or camera, still uses NTLMv1, it will be unable to access the NAS nor play the music from NAS”

… but it’s not clear if the stated workaround applies to this Synology disk station model, so I would just check that fact prior to purchase.

An important thing to remember if you have a large collection: the Sonos database has a 65k limit for the amount of songs it can hold. For a larger collection you could use Plex or  LMS. I use Plex, but severely miss a folder view for Plex in the Sonos app.

That’s a good catch by @Ken_Griffiths .  It’s really a problem with Sonos S1 rather than the NAS, so you have to decide whether it would actually be a good thing to find an alternative NAS that supports S1, given the security concerns.

I used dbPowerAmp to rip my CDs and was very happy with it.

With S1 Sonos you have no choice but to use SMBv1. For this reason I use a sacrificial NAS for Sonos. This is an LG, which has now been running pretty much 24x7x365 for 11 years - I’m expecting it to fail sometime, so have a spare Buffalo NAS ready to switch in when it does.

My main data is on a Synology, which doesn’t have SMBv1 enabled.

I know nothing against dbPowerAmp, but i’ve always used Exact Audio Copy (EAC) which is free. For updating metadata I use MP3Tag, which is also free.

The 65k limit on tracks is not fixed - if you have lots of metadata or long filenames/paths then you will hit the Sonos limits much sooner.

As @106rallye says, the lack of a folder view in the Sonos version of Plex makes it effectively useless for people with varied musical tastes.

I have a DS920 and a DS411 both Synology and both running during day hours for a few years.  The 920 serves music and audio books to the home, the 411 does weekly backups of the playable libraries.  Never had a problem, a couple of cheaper disc platters failed but replacement was effortless.  i recommend Synology and/or QNAP, both reliable and well priced.

Thanks for all the information you’ve provided above. It’s really useful but I would like to understand  how risky is it if I use the Synology NAS with SMBv1 enabled and play my music using Sonos 1. 

I will be plugging the Synology NAS directly to my router and the only thing on it will be my music. All my private data is on my laptop (linked to my router by WIFI) and in the cloud (I use Office 365). So is the only thing at risk the Synology NAS (i.e. my music) or would all my data be at risk? If it’s just my music then I don’t have a problem with using SMBv1.

For me to upgrade the 4 older Sonos components to achieve Sonos 2 is really expensive, hence my follow up questions.

I suppose the alternative is to look at a different NAS (I don’t want one with RAID) but would I hit the same problem given I need to use Sonos 1? If not, what other NAS might be suitable? I don’t have heaps of music so it can be quite small.

Thanks everyone.

@CJ61 

If you search online for “smb v1 vulnerability and wannacry ransomeware” you should be able to read all about the issues that relate to that version of the sharing protocol.

Unfortunately the older Sonos S1 software uses that version of SMB for a NAS library share, so using a different brand of NAS is not going to make any difference, but there are ways of sharing local music files for playback on Sonos without using that version of SMB and one example of that is sharing files using Plex, or you could opt to share a library via a PC/MAC instead using the ‘http’ protocol. However the latter means having to leave a computer switched on.

In my own case I happily ran a NAS on my own LAN with SMB v1 for a number of years, but many did advise against it. I eventually switched to SMB v3 and so now mainly use my library share with my Sonos S2 devices only.

I use a Raspberry Pi for my Sonos NAS, it is happy to do SMB v1 and that lets me keep my main NAS set more securely. Pi are badly overpriced right now (supply issues) but if you can find a used one they are great.

Lots of schools used Pi in the classroom and to send home with the kids. Any Pi will work, Pi 1 or newer, any of the Zero’s. Add a thumb drive to store the music.