The Sonos Brexit and pragmatic ways past it

Forum|Forum|6 years ago
January 23, 2020
570 replies
22877 views

I will start this thread with a few caveats:

First, this thread is not for rants. There are plenty here for those, and there is no bar on opening new ones.

Second, the thread is directed for the subset of users that have a large investment in legacy products, and are content to see their Sonos systems as music systems that offer stable streamed music from either a NAS or from the net, and have no expectation of more bells and whistles - just that things continue to work as they are working today. I happen to be in this boat as well, as someone that has three out of six zones running very well on legacy products that I simply cannot afford to jettison until the hardware dies.

Third, this thread is based on facts, some of which have been coming to light only over the last 48 or so hours. It is therefore incomplete to an extent, and may even be wrong in places. Feel free therefore to clarify/correct/add as necessary - and I specifically invite @Ryan S to do so. But, no rants please - they have a place, but this is not it.

All that said, this is the solution I intend to proceed with and recommend here:

Opt for a legacy system operation in May, that will run legacy and modern products, exactly as these run today; no faffing around with two networks. No more enhancements, but expecting Sonos to honestly fulfil their recent promise of all bug fixes that the legacy products can accommodate. Ditto for what needs to be done to accommodate changes driven by at least the mainstream service providers.

By a happy coincidence, all legacy products have line in jacks. So if something even happens at the streaming service end that cannot be accommodated in legacy products, I am confident of finding some device that can be wired to the line in jacks of these, that will still allow streaming from the culprit service to work including in grouped mode with all other products in the system.

The streaming from the local NAS will not have any issues in this mode, other than hardware failures including that of the NAS, and a key assumption here is that NAS changes will not need a Sonos software update.

Although Sonos has said that new products can be added to such a system, I do not see how this is possible once new products come installed with versions that are beyond the frozen legacy system one. Unless Sonos is not going to sell any new products in future with versions beyond the 2020 legacy one - I doubt that. And once a product comes with the latest version, adding it to a legacy system without rendering legacy products inoperable is going to be tricky because it will involve first separating the one system into two; I also admit to being a little fuzzy with this bit. In my case, this is all moot; I have no need for another zone. As an aside, I am someone therefore that is not of much interest to Sonos!

I also assume that if anyone at any time in the future wanted to jettison legacy products for any reason, all they will need to do is leave all such products powered off, invoke updates and the result will be a Sonos system updated to the day they do the invocation. The concern here for me is different - I need to have an ironclad way of NOT updating my system before I am ready to separate or jettison legacy products, and this needs more insights into how things will work on this front in future.

I am pretty sure that this way ahead will work in my use case and I suggest it will also work for many that are heavily invested in Sonos legacy products, that do not want to write it off or to trade up to new products just to retain all existing functionality.

Yes, it involves losing future enhancements/features, but once we accept that these essentially are music boxes that will keep doing all they do today, that should be an acceptable trade off, I suggest. It is to me, for sure.

So this way, this event will be just a minor inconvenience, and I expect to be able to use all my existing products till the hardware fails.

What this event has convince me though is to now look at/recommend smart systems that are truly modular in the sense that the smart bits can be periodically replaced at low cost, while the core “dumb” electronic hardware can be of such build/after sales support, that it justifies the higher investment in the consequent price, if better sound quality is also needed than what the smart front ends can alone provide. But that's for the future.

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Show previous replies

K

KumarAuthor

Question after raspberry use - I have read warnings about dire trouble possibilities to the Pi if it is shut down at the mains, without first shutting it down via GUI/Terminal.

I have never come across such for turning off Sonos, which can only be turned off by pulling the mains power. Why is Sonos not susceptible to similar issues, containing as it does, a computer?

F

FarFromGruntled

Lyricist III

Sonos, like most consumer electronics, run shutdown routines on power off. RPi, on the other hand is a much simpler animal. You can buy switches for the Pi that will run these routines as they operate. I generally use Terminal if I need to shut down, but as my Pi is stable I rarely need to do so.

Any damage that might occur is to the SD card, so I have spare cards with backup copies of my Pi systems. All I need to do is to replace the card and I’m good to go. Etcher makes backups simple.

K

KumarAuthor

@FarFromGruntled : yes, for Pi I am sorted, I have figured out a few ways to shut it down properly, so based on what is most convenient, I can do that.

A question though - I have my NAS for Echo on a USB stick in the Pi USB port and the files on that NAS are backed up in a two other places. But the mymedia solution and the playlists that I have created laboriously are on the SD card - and I would really like a way to back those up. So, what do I have to do to make an exact copy of the SD card so I can replace it just as you have suggested? Pull it out after power off and find a way to use balena to copy one image to the spare card? Any special routine needed?

As to Sonos, where will it get the power to run those routines you refer to, once the mains power is turned off?!

K

KumarAuthor

I found the back up thing on Google, but the Sonos question remains!

F

FarFromGruntled

Lyricist III

It might be that my assumption that Sonos has a shutdown routine is wrong. Other devices such as Chromecast seem to work fine after a power pull. Knowing that SD card damage is the weakest link in RPi has got me wondering.

I know that it is possible to boot some models of RPi from a USB device instead of from the SD card. I have read that this is preferable because USB sticks and USB external drives used for this purpose are said to be more stable than SD cards. Maybe it’s as simple as that. It’s not the Pi per se that’s the problem, just the card. I haven’t tried it myself but I’m sure that some people here have and can comment.

K

KumarAuthor

While you are correct about the SD card where the Pi is concerned, that is because that is all that can suffer the damage from a power pull if no USB card is in use! And I remember reading this to be true of computers in general - they do not like to have the power pulled on them. One gets so used to battery equipped laptops and iPad like devices, that this ceases to be an issue.

But logically, this also should then be an issue for Sonos that no one seems to talk about - all that is said here as far as I know is that electronic kit usually lives longer when not power cycled, but that is a different issue/aspect.

So my question is now not Pi but Sonos directed.

Ken_Griffiths

RPi is not something I personally use, but thought it seemed plausible to schedule the 'proper shutdown' of the device, so perhaps see if this link may ‘possibly’ help as an alternative…

https://ediy.com.my/index.php/tutorials/item/105-raspberry-pi-schedule-reboot

My thoughts being to change the command mentioned from 'sudo reboot’ to 'sudo shutdown’ and set an appropriate time to shutdown the RPi each evening, when you are done for the day.

Better than a manual solution to shutdown, at least.

C

castalla

Local Superstar

Investigate cron as a way to run scheduled tasks.

Another way to shut down is the command:

sudo halt -p

It's the courageous bee's knees - all 6 🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝. - - - - - Make Sonos Great Again - - - - -

K

KumarAuthor

There is choice of commands for power off, including sudo poweroff - but the thing is that since I prefer to also not have the red light showing on a powered down Pi, that means a manual turning off the mains power switch - and that also has to be done manually to turn the Pi on again after a shut down even if the power switch is left turned on, so I do not need a schedule for just the Pi shut down command.

All very minor things in what is now proving to be a very stable set up. And the mymedia being ready automatically to serve after a power cycle is also working fine, so this is a very neat solution to getting NAS to play via voice command with album art on display equipped Echo devices. Whether the downstream unit then is a Sonos speaker or something else is irrelevant.

Which is why I treated myself to a new Echo Show last week - the larger 8 model. It also does a better job of You Tube music videos, via downstream quality speakers.

K

KumarAuthor

This, by Sonos, is massive; the recycling nonsense to get the 30% discount is discontinued.

https://www.engadget.com/2020/03/05/sonos-kills-its-device-bricking-recycle-mode/?guccounter=1

At least a month late, but better late than never.