The Sonos Brexit and pragmatic ways past it

@Ryan S says that individual targeting isn't possible; unless, may I speculate, the filter has turned rogue like HAL...

Indulging my curiosity to see if I am still being targeted by the tech here, seeing that all my posts anywhere here have not made it through without significant delays and one is still missing.

It’s a bit bizarre - you’d have thought that they’d have a whitelist of trusted users - or rules to achieve the same objective...

It is bizarre in many ways - I have to reach Ryan via PM, he then clears the post. Except for the last two above - the last one was not caught and the one preceding surfaced immediately thereafter. All this at a time when Sonos resources are under pressure to manage things other than these antics. And the continued existence of nonsense like this spam subject that is more than three years old leads one to think that intelligence levels of marketing/support management are not much higher than that residing in the spam filter AI. Which also probably the reason for the legacy units fiasco.

On the thread topic itself, with Echo Dots/Shows wired to Sonos Line in jacks, I am sorted. And the Connect that I recently received means that I do not now much care if the Alexa India integration is not released before May. Indeed, if it does not allow for artwork to be displayed on Echo Show as it presently does not anywhere in the world, I have no use for it. Once accustomed to the artwork presence, it is missed when absent.

Getting the NAS to play via Echo Show voice commands with album art is working fine too - I just need to move that solution to a Raspberry so that the solution can run with no need of my Mac which I do not want to leave awake 24/7. Yes, that does need internet to work, but isn't any less pragmatic for that even in India - stable high speed broadband now is pretty much 24/7 here.

Yes… AFAICS, all the problems surrounding this come down to the original decision to go with inSided - it’s probably pointless to speculate as to ‘why’, but it seems to stagger from the initial ‘totally inadequate’ to ‘still deficient’. Oh, well, NMP…

As to the thread, although I’ve been interested in following the legacy fiasco, it doesn’t really affect me at all. I didn’t like the way that Sonos was going (for my use) a couple of years ago, so locked down my system. Consequently, nothing that they do can affect my music system any more. In addition, using a similar approach to yours but with Chromecast Audio on the Play 5s and Chromecast on my AV receiver, I can keep things going until the hardware fails.

In some ways, the legacy approach actually works for me, as I could stay on a stable version yet still be able to add new kit if I wanted to - so I could probably open up access again with less risk. I’d lose the use of a Kindle Fire, but the next Black Friday sale on Amazon would soon sort that out.

As we’ve both said before, at least this announcement has crystallised my views on separating the ‘smart’ from the (expensive to replace) ‘dumb’. I won’t fall for that one again, hopefully 

A question for those with Raspberry experience: Suppose I were to copy a subset of my existing NAS to a SSD USB stick of 128 Gb, and park that stick in the Raspberry, directing the mymedia for Alexa to scan the folders on that SSD stick for serving Echo devices. Will that work well? That way, I do not need to power up my main NAS that is used for Sonos, everytime I want to use Echo devices to play that subset of NAS music which sees use more often than the many tracks on the main NAS that I never listen to.

This isn't a Sonos question - Sonos will remain pointed to the main NAS. It is a Echo+mymedia for Alexa+Raspberry 3B+ question.

The question in the preceding post is answered by doing exactly this, using a Raspberry Pi 3, with a USB stick parked in it. The Pi is ethernet wired to a nearby play 1 unit - thank goodness it has that jack - to allow the Sonos to do the heavy lifting of wireless propagation of the music that is voice commanded to play from Echo Show/Spot in different parts of the home, with album art. AIFF/ALAC/AAC all play with a transcoding thing enabled in the mymedia app.

The only fiddly thing about the mymedia app is playlist building, but I think there are some workarounds there that I have not discovered yet.

The 128Gb USB stick contains 4000 tracks of my 20000 strong main NAS, that is now left powered off. The Pi can be powered off, and on reboot, is ready to serve music in the few minutes the reboot needs. No intervention needed.

I was hesitant about this Pi thing, but I am now sold on it, and not just for this application. I have used more of the Mac Terminal in the last four days than in the last ten years.

A brand new hobby, courtesy of the Sonos legacy event. A Pi camera module is on order:-).

Many thanks to @castalla for all the handholding. 

I would recommend starting this with a USB keyboard/mouse, and a HDMI cable supplied TV - this is a much easier way to get going to those of us who have never seen command line inputs. Even if it has to be bought, the keyboard/mouse is very cheap and worth the investment, for beginners.

A question, which does not deserve a thread of its own:

If I wanted to take a similarly loaded USB stick, is there a way to use another Pi to make playlists from it, and command the Pi to play these with album art via the HDMI port to a TV?

The next doable step would be to pipe the audio from the TV to Sonos line in jacks - that works fine for both Spotify and You Tube music videos, supplied to a HDMI port on the TV via Chromecast, so it would work for this as well.

The advantage would be to get access to local music, with album art on display on a wall panel, and sound via grouped Sonos speakers, all wired to the router to ensure music play stability. Without needing the internet for this - the WiFi would be needed for smartphone control.

And since a picture is better than words, here are two - one of the source in a remote bedroom and one of one target zone in the large open space. Now that this set up works so well for NAS as well, I don't see any reason to have a split system and will stay in legacy mode as long as the Sonos hardware keeps working. Even streaming service degradation is not a problem for zones that do not have line in jacks and the play 1, to which the Pi is ethernet wired, will not lose its ability to propagate a wired + wireless Sonos net carried stream to everywhere in the home.

Source:

Target zone:

But, it does need the internet to be available, since the Echos that are part of the set up will not work without that.

A word about sound quality after two days of use - no discernible change from the way my Rudy Van Gelder jazz remasters sounded via a high end CD player back in the day and how they sound today run through a Pi/Echo/Sonos Line In jacks - through the same/similar speakers. Now, this is obviously from memory and no blind tests have been done, but with all the numerous times the signal stream must be going through ADC to DAC, there seems to be no audible evidence left in its wake. Since I am getting the sound I expected from these old AIFF rips, there doesn't seem any point in delving further on this aspect. Whatever little there may be lost on sound quality is probably more than made up via album art as far as the listening experience goes, which is much better overall.