The Sonos Brexit and pragmatic ways past it - ADVANCED APPROACHES

Forum|Forum|6 years ago
February 1, 2020
119 replies
3295 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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arcadelt

Enthusiast I

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.

Unplug your Internet connection and see what happens. I bet it won’t be pretty.

K

KumarAuthor

@arcadelt : Of course it won’t be pretty, the indexed playlists are in the cloud, it is just the music that is local.

It also won't be pretty if I unplug the mains, so I fail to see your point. My internet provider isn't talking of any event in May 2020.

arcadelt

Enthusiast I

@arcadelt : My internet provider isn't talking of any event in May 2020.

Trust me, it will happen when you least expect it and when it is most inconvenient. Without the Internet, not only will the voice assistant fail, but you will even not be able to use the Alexa app to control anything. Anyway, as I said, better to be prepared, so unplug your Internet and see how the system holds up.

K

KumarAuthor

I know what will happen in that rare event and I have back ups in place that do not need the net. Or even WiFi and the mains power.

C

castalla

Local Superstar

@arcadelt : My internet provider isn't talking of any event in May 2020.

Trust me, it will happen when you least expect it and when it is most inconvenient. Without the Internet, not only will the voice assistant fail, but you will even not be able to use the Alexa app to control anything. Anyway, as I said, better to be prepared, so unplug your Internet and see how the system holds up.

Not to me it wouldn’t! Routers on UPS, each has an Echo attached … so, only in the very unlikely event that both ISps go down at the same time would there be silence

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

K

KumarAuthor

Lol. I have a UPS backed up by a DG set. And there are memory heavy handhelds filled with streaming service downloads for offline listening that I use on the road, easily attached to Sonos Line in jacks, so there would never be silence, even if Sonos went completely bust and their servers went offline, or my ISP went down. And at the end of the day...or night assuming doomsday, there is always the acoustic guitar:-).

These are doomsday scenarios; all are far more remote possibilities than events triggered by Sonos, or their going bankrupt. But this Brexit is a good thing, it has allowed me to take even that bankruptcy possibility into the design of my music delivery systems.

arcadelt

Enthusiast I

I’m not talking about Sonos being a problem, but the Echos.

K

KumarAuthor

Sonos have found a way to play streaming services music without the internet?

arcadelt

Enthusiast I

Are you being deliberately obtuse? Sonos will work locally on a network without the Internet, but Amazon and Google devices will not.

K

KumarAuthor

I still completely fail to see what point you are making. Perhaps I am stupid, perhaps English is not my native tongue. Sonos will work, but limited to music that is available locally. But with 90% of users - per Sonos - now using Sonos for streaming services, it will not work for these 90% minus the internet.

Amazon devices follow the thin client approach as opposed to what Sonos does, and in doing so, rely on reliable internet service being available in support of that approach; and even in India where I live, these are now reliable enough to make use of thin clients without losing any sleep over doing so.

Is it different in your country? If yes, then Echo is not for you.

Moving on...because this is now off topic.

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