The New Sonos App and Future Feature Updates

I’ve always thought that after the controller App device discovery (SSDP or mDNS) was complete, that the communication thereafter is just unicast? The Group Co-ordinator then does all the work surely - and I can’t see that has changed much as my group playback (and initial mDNS discovery for that matter) is not encountering issues with 10 Sonos Rooms (25 Sonos products in total) - admittedly my product IP addresses are reserved in the routers DHCP reservation table, high up in the subnet - so I don’t expect each players mDNS cache to alter in my case, even if a speaker might ever lose its network connection temporarily -  the mesh router I use optimises my connections daily too - during downtime - so that’s usually overnight and often between 4am and 5am.

Just to add too, I’ve not encountered issues, whether I’ve bridged my ISP provided router and used my Mesh WiFi Primary Hub as router, or used the mesh setup in Bridged AP mode and likewise I did see the same robust experience when running my Sonos Products in SonosNet mode linked to either router setup (at least that’s with the products that support SonosNet)  with any non-supported SonosNet products running on the 5Ghz WiFi band, which in my case has the same SSID and credentials as the local 2.4Ghz band.

So based on these things I mention collectively, I still see that @BCJ’s reported issue, is more likely network related and I don’t see anything in Andy Pennell’s articles either that takes anything away from that. He admits that his own knowledge of mDNS discovery is limited, but either way looking closer at the LAN/WAN connection here, it is still a good place to begin troubleshooting - and I think we can all agree that the matter is not Sonos App related in any event.

I just don’t get it. Granted, I’m no coder, ‘app developer’ or even a reasonably proficient amateur. And I’m aware that temporal contiguity does not prove causation.

But come on, folks. Tens of thousand of users — likely many times more — had Sonos systems set up in their homes that were working just fine before the watershed date of May 7, 2024. Those same users have had nothing but trouble since. Their networks didn’t change. They didn’t have to spend countless hours delving into the innards of their LAN/WAN, DHCP, mDNS or any other mixed acronym salads to perform basic functions and play their music, using the app that Sonos previously provided.

If the new app is not sufficiently flexible and robust to work properly in varied environments, and to work for all but a small handful of outliers, then sorry, but that’s on the app and the ‘firmware’ — not the customers.

Every other service I use via my home network — streaming video, cable tv networks, music streaming services, whatever — worked before May 7 and continued to work after. Just one thing changed — that damned app and the ‘firmware’ [whatever that means] on my Sonos speakers.

It’s a home music system. No special skill required and you can find your music and play it — when the ‘app’ and the ‘firmware’ work as intended.

They aren’t working as intended; and they haven’t worked for months now. Period. I’ll be convinced otherwise when I can download an ‘update’ and things return to normal. Until such time, Sonos broke it and it’s up to Sonos to fix it… not me; and not the hordes of Sonos customers who have been nothing but frustrated for months and asked to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to get their Sonos speaker systems to perform as they did before and as they reasonably expect they will again.

As usual @chambolle, you capture the zeitgeist of Normal People extremely well! Bravo!

While many users do have issues they can fix themselves, it is dispiriting to see real problems* dismissed with the blinders of “works here, must be something wrong with your setup.”

* Things reported by many users that cannot be fixed by following a set of 1-2-3 instructions

@chambolle, 

Just curious, have you spoken to Sonos Support at all about your non-working system and if the answer is ‘yes’ - what was the outcome?

What did the Staff say was the likely cause of the issue you’re seeing?

Also @chambolle you posted a week or two ago saying you were not going to install any further Sonos updates until the point has been reached of ‘reasonable stability’ or words along those lines. So are you still running your setup with an older version of the Sonos App and a newer version of the Sonos firmware,  as that might ‘perhaps’ be causing you some additional issues too?

edit: it seems you also avoided the earlier July 22nd Sonos App update too according to your post here:

https://en.community.sonos.com/product-updates/update-on-the-sonos-app-from-patrick-spence-6900501/index2.html?postid=9689#post9689

Yes, Ken, I wasted hours trying to connect with Sonos support. I spent considerable time working with Sonos support. After various tweaks, the upshot was ‘these are known issues’ and ‘that will be addressed in a future update.’ And at one point, someone suggested the entire mess could be caused by a faulty ethernet cable. Far fetched, but I replaced the cable. No dice. 

By now, my ‘non-working system’ is working as well as it can given the defects in the app and the firmware. I’ve been able to limp along with the help of a 3rd party app, which at least allows me to locate the music I ‘archived’ in Sonos playlists before May 7. I can live without various buzzers and bells like alarms and sleep timers and voice activation and trueplay and whatnot. I’ve even learned to tolerate annoyances like occasional crashes, slow response to simple commands like volume up or down, and the fact that going from the display of the track playing back to the list of tracks in the queue returns to the top of the queue — pretty inconvenient when the queue is 400 tracks long.

With all that, I’m frankly not all that stressed at this point. I’ll say this, I went freaking ballistic the day I opened the app and all of my music — all of my Sonos playlists —was gone. Disappeared without warning; without explanation; and with no assurance any of it could be retrieved ever again. I thought that was just me — why would I think otherwise? I then noticed the Sonos app would not even allow me to access my music services to play a track at a time, much less start the laborious process of trying to recreate my playlists. Nothing worked, and I had no idea why. That’s when I headed for Sonos support. That’s when I first got a clue this was a firestorm of failure and that Sonos staff was overwhelmed.

Thankfully I now know those playlists have not been lost forever, not yet anyway. But that’s not thanks to Sonos… I had to cast around the ‘community’ for an explanation while Sonos spent weeks pretending everything was perfectly normal and ‘Luddites’ like me must be the problem.

Others still evidently have more debilitating problems with their systems than I do now, or aren’t willing to live without various buzzers and bells Sonos provided before May 7 and that are problematic now. I don’t much care, to be honest. I just want to find, save and play music. Period.

In any event, I am able to play music on my system, so long as I live with the current limitations and try to ignore the annoying bugs. And I am no longer willing to bust my pick trying to chase what is still a moving target while Sonos continues to release update after update in an effort to restore full functionality to its customers. 

I await the day Sonos will say — and when I can confirm — that everything works again. I will then download the latest app, update ‘firmware,’ and  hopefully can assume it’ll work; and that if it doesn’t, Sonos support can help me fix it without great difficulty. That’s how it’s supposed to work. It hasn’t worked that way since May 7.

And no, I am not going to continue downloading one update after another and thereby risking I will lose the limited functionality I have now. I won’t update ‘firmware’ or the ‘app’ until I am confident both are ready for prime time and not just another experiment. None of the recent updates address my major concerns; and checking into the community posts, I’ve seen many reports that each update has brought new problems. I don’t need new problems. I just need a return to normal, trouble-free operation.

@chambolle,

I understand your frustration and can see most of it in the past has centred around Sonos playlists and queue management/editing - that’s reading back through your posts, but you did mention you were not going to update your App (at least on two occasions) and would not do so until you were happy things were stable. 
 

So I was not sure where you are at the moment, when you mentioned your speakers hadn’t worked for months now. Anyhow I assume now that you mean for your Sonos playlists. 
 

Sonos are aware of that matter and have published this Support link:

https://support.sonos.com/en-us/article/the-new-sonos-app-and-future-feature-updates

I suspect they will be fixed in either September or October - meanwhile you can perhaps continue to access them from the Sonos Desktop Controllers or the 3rd party App you mentioned earlier. There’s not much any of us can do about a missing feature until Sonos restore that functionality. 
 

If you’re having problems with any other areas of the App, then if you’ve not done so already, I suggest you update both your Sonos App and firmware and if problems persist after that, then it maybe best to reproduce the issue(s) seen and then immediately submit a Sonos system diagnostic report from within the Sonos App, note it’s reference and then contact/chat with Sonos Support Staff again via this LINK and see what the Staff can perhaps suggest to help you to resolve the matter.

Not completely. SSDP is an announcement based system with regular “heartbeats” so the controller apps have a max age and the devices make announcements to the SSDP multicast addresses at regular intervals. If the controller misses announcements and the max-age hits, then the controller should perform service discovery again.

mDNS is more event based and devices don’t perform regular announcements. When a device starts it goes through a probe phase (to ensure the name it wants isn’t already in use) then an advertisment phase. The device then doesn’t need to advertise itself unless something changes, eg IP address changes, interface goes down and up and it just responds to queries and watches other queries and responses on the mDNS multicast network.
Amongst various timings of when things need to happen the specs also require a randomised window before starting, to prevent things like broadcast storms it a switch is restarted so all devices advertising services stagger their probe/advertisments due to the network interface coming up instead of all hitting the switch in one go. 

The static IP addresses are likely to be of little benefit for mDNS. While not hard defined in the specification, the recommended Time To Live setting for records containing host information is 120 seconds. For all other records it is to be set at 75 minutes. Even before a TTL is reached, hosts will update their cache based on other queries and responses they observe if their cache is different and they would expect to answer. It would be an edge case where the cached hostname/IP is reused and the static IP is beneficial for mDNS.

When the controller device last received a host record more than 120 seconds ago it’s cache is already invalid so it needs query for up to date records.

While mDNS shares things familiar from unicast DNS is has it’s own set of requirements and rules to suit it’s purpose for multicast, with no central source of truth and changing devices.

Yes, I’ve seen that September/October is the target date for queue editing and such. I assume that means I will at some point be able to display and open Sonos playlists in the app, without resort to a third party ‘patch’; and that I will be able to add and subtract music from an existing playlist and create new playlists. The fact that might wind up taking five to six months from the initial release date is… let’s just say breathtaking.

I’ve tried using the desktop controller by opening it on my tablet via safari, and it hasn’t worked for me, not sure why. And I’m not about to resort to a laptop just to play some tunes with my morning espresso.

The desktop controllers don’t install/work on tablets - it’s either Windows 10 (or higher) and MacOS 10.12 (or higher) only. Nor do they use a web browser. The controllers are available here:

https://support.sonos.com/en-us/downloads