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February 1, 2020

The Sonos Brexit and pragmatic ways past it - ADVANCED APPROACHES

  • February 1, 2020
  • 119 replies
  • 3296 views

A little over a week ago, I started a thread to engage with like minded people here: those that felt the way I did, as explained in my opening post there. That thread was titled: “The Sonos Brexit and pragmatic ways past it” and I intended that to be the last thread I open on this site.

A link to that thread:

https://en.community.sonos.com/controllers-software-228995/the-sonos-brexit-and-pragmatic-ways-past-it-6836056

That thread has grown beyond expectations. While everyone on it has contributed to keep it profanity free and largely rant free, with an occasional nudge by @Edward R in that effort, just by virtue of its length, it has become unwieldy as all long threads become. And it has many days to run, because the Sonos Brexit event, and the release of detailed information about it by Sonos, are both at least three months away.

I therefore thought that it made sense to break my promise to myself - No More Threads - and make just this one exception to it, by opening this thread. It is meant to discuss such approaches and options that may be employed by advanced users that are comfortable going well beyond plug and play options in pursuit of ways past this Sonos Brexit with or without incorporating any Sonos product in it. The original thread linked above may then be used for options that probably a majority of Sonos users will be able to employ - the plug and play kind of options towards the same objective. Which are those that employ off the shelf third party devices that are self contained, such as Echo Dots as an example, where the only wiring, if needed, is external - a stereo wire running between Sonos and non Sonos devices. And which do not involve any coding or any attempt to get under the Sonos hood. Or which involve server like devices that need a complex set up to get it to work with Sonos. In brief, something that non geeks - and I am one of those - will be able to cope with, belong to the original thread, while the complex options belong to this thread, as its title suggests.

There is no set in stone dividing line between the two approaches and none is needed. I am sure that community judgement can be relied on to keep the two threads distinct, linked by a common ethos, in a way that both end up being more useful than one thread will be.

I will visit this thread, but here I do not expect to further any discussion forward significantly - that will be beyond my abilities. So, lurking mode here, most if not all of the time. And if I find anything useful here that makes sense to the original thread, I will steal with no compunctions!

So, well before Sonos forks out legacy and modern systems into two, a fork to serve all that will be effected by the Sonos fork.

I apologies for the clunky title, which is an outcome of the original thread being blessed with a clunky one.

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    119 replies

    KumarAuthor
    February 8, 2020

     

    Is your nas always on and accessible to the mac?

    Yes, it is.

    KumarAuthor
    February 8, 2020

    Google suggests that the fact that I can copy a file on the Mac and paste it to the WD by opening it by just on clicking WD in the Mac Finder window means that the WD is mapped to the Mac, which is the same as mounting it!

    Which is also why for setting up the Music library for Sonos from the Mac for music files lying in the WD, it just involved pointing Sonos to the SharedMusic folder on the WD, visible on the Mac - and the Sonos controller can now be told to play music sitting in the WD. 

    So this is back to square one.

    KumarAuthor
    February 8, 2020

    If you see the Mac finder screenshot I have posted, there is a eject like button seen next to the WD - tapping on that would eject - unmount - the WD. So why mymedia is not seeing it from the Mac is a mystery.

    KumarAuthor
    February 8, 2020

    And I have asked mymedia support these questions, response awaited.

    Local Superstar
    February 8, 2020

    No, there is just one tab in mymedia settings - I have now received a email from support that I need to mount my WD to my Mac and then point mymedia to that mount. Why Sonos does not need this is a mystery, but I will now try to google and find out how to do this mounting!

     

    Sonos uses samba to access the WD directly.  MM needs to access via a locally mounted folder on the PC it’s running on.   

    No idea why the WD share isn’t showing under /Volumes/Public - let’s hope the dev has a solution.  I sent him the screenshots you posted.

    I’m out again this afternoon until about 5pm CET

    It's the courageous bee's knees - all 6 🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝. - - - - - Make Sonos Great Again - - - - -
    KumarAuthor
    February 9, 2020

    @castalla : thanks for the above and beyond levels of assistance here, via PM and emails.

    I followed the instructions for mounting the WD - over and above mapping it to the Mac so that it could be seen by the Mac as had been done in 2016. This mapping was enough for Sonos to use the WD as NAS, but even after the mounting that has been done per the link you sent, the mymedia dashboard is still not listing the WD as a drive that can be selected for indexing.

    Since the mymedia app did work to allow Echo show to play media downloaded to the Mac from mymedia, this is puzzling and frustrating, because the solution to NAS play on the Show seems to be in sight!

    Local Superstar
    February 9, 2020

    Wish a Mac guru could help out here!

    It's the courageous bee's knees - all 6 🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝. - - - - - Make Sonos Great Again - - - - -
    KumarAuthor
    February 9, 2020

    Success!!! thanks largely to @castalla - all I did was not give up:-). Highly appreciated, the day into one long night effort.

    So now, via the mymedia solution, I have my 19637 NAS tracks made available for the first time to Echos via voice command play, with album art where the Echo Show 5 is present. And wired as it is to the Line In of the Connect Amp, this can continue until the Sonos hardware dies. This is something I ended up exploring only because of the Sonos legacy event and will give the NAS a new lease of life; NAS supplied playlists also won't miss volume normalisation as much as streaming service often do. So, a plus for the Sonos decision in an unexpected way.

    At USD 5 a year, it is a bargain, this solution.

    I have to admit it took quite some playing around to get it to work, and I can't recollect all I did in the process to various settings. It will mean leaving the Mac out of sleep mode when the music is playing, but will not need any other interaction with it for music to play. At some time I will see if I use this enough to justify a leap into the unknown that is the Raspberry to take the Mac out of the loop completely.

    What remains to be seen is what happens if two Echo Shows are grouped, wired to Sonos Line In jacks, and one is asked to start playing from the NAS - will the other one also show artwork? And more important, before the artwork question - will two Echos playing in multi group mode play this source? I have my doubts. Even so, for little money, this is a good solution for single zone play.

    I will leave with a picture, of Echo Show 5 playing an album from the NAS, with album art, commanded to start play via voice command, through Sonos Line In. A very neat solution that needs Sonos for just amplification.

     

    Local Superstar
    February 9, 2020

    Congrats!

    Sadly it won’t work for grouped echos - an Amazon problem, apparently.

    A pi solution would likely be easier to set-up (with some finnicking about - but the advantage is that’s there lots of help available).

    A low-cost option would be a rasberry pi 3b+  - the newer pi 4 is probably overkill

    ps: my O2 Joggler project is continuing … updated pics soon.

    It's the courageous bee's knees - all 6 🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝. - - - - - Make Sonos Great Again - - - - -
    KumarAuthor
    February 9, 2020

     

    Sadly it won’t work for grouped echos - an Amazon problem, apparently.

     

    But it will work for Sonos multiroom activated via Line In - so all that will be missing is album art in more than one location. And that multi room will also work in one Sonos system as long as the hardware works.