Wishlist for Sonos Controller Improvements

Not sure if it's already on the list, but I'd love it if I could set all players to group automatically when music is played (as opposed to TV). I believe the player can tell the difference, so the logic here isn't all that complex. Essentially this is whenever the optical input on Playbar is NOT the source.

As it stands I have to go to the app every time I play music to first group all players. Having this happen automatically would also improve the usability of the recent Spotify 'direct' control as there would then be no need to group before starting music in Spotify.

Edit: Not sure if this is the same as 'permanent zone combining'. In my case I wouldn't want to *always* hear TV audio throughout the home, so truly permanent zone combining wouldn't seem the same to me.

I voted "roll back" simply because I hate the "play now and obliterate the queue" functionality that came in last year. Great app apart from this horrible regression,

Agreed

Improvement not listed but really want: Parental/password control on zones.

Have seen it requested before. I'm highly doubtful you will ever see that happen.

My one wish. I have over 2,000 albums ripped to a music server (Vortexbox). I am old fashioned (and old) and like to listen to albums in their entirety. And I like to just set it to a "shuffle" or "random" play. Would it be possible to add such a function? To be able to just select "albums" ->"shuffle albums" or "random albums" and have one album play then go to another one etc. would be excellent (and one for "random artists", too, although not as important to me). Also, a way to skip an album if I just don't happen to feel like listening to it at the moment. Oh, if there is already this function in your app, I could not find it. Thanks.

Check out the available 3rd party apps.

I know of Sonopad. And Zonos is Windows only apparently. So what else is there? For an iPad.

Rewind and forward 15 second buttons. Using the progress bar is difficult and for a long podcast (45 minutes or so) requires precision which is not possible on a small iPhone screen

I would like an auto-regroup so that when my playbar auto ungroups when detecting TV audio, when the audio has gone it can go back in the group it was in, perhaps with settings to control whether it should or shouldn't if the group is currently playing so that the playbar doesn't suddenly play. Maybe that would require some 'permanent' groups that can be named instead of the ad-hoc creation.

- Cache album artwork in the app and update when update when updating the music library. Album artwork almost never seems to appear, or when it does, it loads album by album, much more slowly than I'm scrolling, as if it's loading from the iTunes library.
- Meaningful shuffle / or Genius-like function that crosses over various albums, preferably with some information about what songs are likely to be played together.
- More informative error codes. Is the problem that the library isn't on the network, that there are network problems? Errors like [1001] or [1002] are no help.
- More meaningful layout when album artwork is absent. The controller layout on iOS places so much emphasis on the album artwork that the functional elements of the interface are relatively small. This is fine if artwork is showing. But since (see above) artwork very rarely shows up in my app, functional interface items shouldn't take a back seat to a placeholder icon.
- Ability to use Controller app to play library music from mobile device speakers. When out in the yard, or in a room that doesn't have Sonos components, it would be great to be able to play from the music library