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February 1, 2020

The Sonos Brexit and pragmatic ways past it - ADVANCED APPROACHES

  • February 1, 2020
  • 119 replies
  • 3293 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

    Local Superstar
    February 20, 2020

    Yeah that’s the one - mainly purchased out of curiosity (it was only £15). It was back in the day when someone suggested making up a PI based CR100 type controller.

    I got the desktop version loaded on to it but then gave up…..

    I’m using windows, I have my music library on an always on PC but it’s smallish at about 80GB and 9K tracks

    So, what do you want to use it for?  If you are using Win then  it should be relatively easy to get up and running.  The music is on what type of PC?

    It's the courageous bee's knees - all 6 🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝. - - - - - Make Sonos Great Again - - - - -
    KumarAuthor
    February 21, 2020

     

    Will continue this as personal emails.  

    Is there any reason for you not to carry on posting this very useful info in the forum?

     

     

    This is so that we don't burden this thread with stupid questions like this one! :

    @castalla : commands are shown as sentences that have words in them. Is any space between words always a single space?

    And I am not planning to install a desktop - just running a HDMI cable to my TV so I can use the keyboard and mouse on the GUI that the TV will then show.

    There is also a detailed set up guide on the mymedia site, so I am hoping I should be ok till the time comes to mount stuff.

    Local Superstar
    February 21, 2020

    Yes - assume a space is a single space.

    Are you getting a micro SD card with Noobs already installed?  If so, then I think the Noobs setup will install the desktop version of Raspian.

    The version we want is Raspian Lite which will boot the pi to a command prompt.  See the link previously

    It's the courageous bee's knees - all 6 🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝. - - - - - Make Sonos Great Again - - - - -
    Enthusiast II
    February 21, 2020

    Yeah that’s the one - mainly purchased out of curiosity (it was only £15). It was back in the day when someone suggested making up a PI based CR100 type controller.

    I got the desktop version loaded on to it but then gave up…..

    I’m using windows, I have my music library on an always on PC but it’s smallish at about 80GB and 9K tracks

    So, what do you want to use it for?  If you are using Win then  it should be relatively easy to get up and running.  The music is on what type of PC?

    Well, I plan initially to just use it as my media storage on a 128GB SD card but may progress to adding LMS at a later stage as that looks interesting. Currently my MP3s are on a bog standard desktop PC with Windows.

    Leave it with me for now, I think I’ve got the general gist of where to go - many thanks for your assistance….

    Cheers

    John

    Local Superstar
    February 21, 2020

    Looks like cards larger than 32 GB have to be SDXC: 32 GB to 2 TB

    …. from what I’ve gleaned it should work with the official raspian img.

    Be sure to expand the root partition as a first step after the system boots.

    See  https://elinux.org/RPi_raspi-config

    It's the courageous bee's knees - all 6 🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝. - - - - - Make Sonos Great Again - - - - -
    Local Superstar
    February 21, 2020
    It's the courageous bee's knees - all 6 🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝. - - - - - Make Sonos Great Again - - - - -
    KumarAuthor
    February 24, 2020
    Lyricist I
    April 23, 2020

    All set up and running fine, with a link to the detailed explanation:

    https://en.community.sonos.com/controllers-software-228995/the-sonos-brexit-and-pragmatic-ways-past-it-6836056/index22.html#post16407760

    I really like this approach and I have tried to replicate this in my system.  All was working fine, mymedia app established, USB stick successfully mounted, playing music on Echo from Pi4 nicely via WiFi.

    I then  tried to connect the Pi to my Sonos system via Ethernet.  As soon as the ethernet cable was inserted into my Play 1, the WiFi connection on the Pi4 dropped.  I’ve done various bits of googling but I can’t see an obvious fix (and even if I had found an obvious one, I would struggle to implement is as a Pi newbie).

    Any thoughts anyone please - I’m so close!

    bockersjv
    Local Superstar
    April 23, 2020

    I built a Pi based Nas drive and this has started me thinking about many other Pi projects including this one.