Contributor I

Answered

Bring back the ability to search music library

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
May 8, 2024
119 replies
6027 views

I have been using Sonos for several years, and it is attached to a streaming service and my music library on a USB drive, which has years worth of accumulated music, including a lot not available on streaming. I have just (8 May) updated to the new Sonos app. Now I can still see and trawl through my music library, but cannot search in it. The general search function just returns the streaming and Sonos radio results, and there’s no dedicated search for the music library. This effectively cuts off my access to my own music, by making it prohibitively difficult to find anything. Please bring this functionality back. I know you want to prioritise revenue generation, but this is disrespectful to your customers.

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Best answer by BazDistro

Taking away search capabilities is bad enough—I’m already looking for Sonos alternatives. But they also removed the alphabetic side bar that allowed us to more efficiently move around the library. It’s hard to imagine this was an oversight. It’s a concerted effort to turn us away from our own music libraries and I agree with others who interpret this as egregious disrespect. If things remain unchanged, this is an absolute deal breaker. I don’t use streaming services and never wish to. Sonos is useless if it cannot help me to easily stream my own carefully curated music collection.

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John Guarr

Enthusiast II

Inceedibly idiotic, do they want to force people to go streaming?

No need to force people that way. It’s already what the vast, vast majority of people want and use.

Yep. Local music is a declining thing, less than 10% of Sonos usage back in 2017, certainly less than 5% today. However, the nonsense about them removing the ability to play local music because of some moustache twirling evil plot to force people onto streaming services (that Sonos make no income from) is silly. It’s just not a priority, and as such, a half-baked app that never should have been released had less prioritized items in the half that was not baked.

Great point! I don’t understand why the local music is declining. I always like to have my own music so I can play a song or piece of classical music whenever I want. I’m not sure if you can do that using a streaming service. Even though I am extremely frustrated with the new app and the number of features they omitted for now, I’m learning a lot listening to everyone’s problems and how they use the Sonos systems. I didn’t realize that there are a lot of users who subscribe to streaming services. But if you stream, can you save a song and place it in your current music list (or queue)? Over the years, I have looked up a lot of background songs that I hear while we are watching some movies on TV and I purchased them in the iTunes Store…. And somehow, I was able to search for something in my local music library, which is on my NAS drive. After I found the song, the only option was “to add song to the end of queue”, which was fine, and once they iron out the queue trouble, I should be able to reposition that song. I wish I could remember how I did that. I only remember that I did it on my Sonos PC app and not on my iPad. Oh, and I just removed a number of songs from one of my playlists using the Sonos PC app. So as I mentioned in another post a few days ago, I rely on my PC app for a lot of things. When I bring up the app it still has the brown box with the black lettering. It is S2 version 16.2. I hope they don’t change that.

John Guarr

Enthusiast II

Inceedibly idiotic, do they want to force people to go streaming?

No need to force people that way. It’s already what the vast, vast majority of people want and use.

Yep. Local music is a declining thing, less than 10% of Sonos usage back in 2017, certainly less than 5% today. However, the nonsense about them removing the ability to play local music because of some moustache twirling evil plot to force people onto streaming services (that Sonos make no income from) is silly. It’s just not a priority, and as such, a half-baked app that never should have been released had less prioritized items in the half that was not baked.

Great point! I don’t understand why the local music is declining. I always like to have my own music so I can play a song or piece of classical music whenever I want. I’m not sure if you can do that using a streaming service. Even though I am extremely frustrated with the new app and the number of features they omitted for now, I’m learning a lot listening to everyone’s problems and how they use the Sonos systems. I didn’t realize that there are a lot of users who subscribe to streaming services. But if you stream, can you save a song and place it in your current music list (or queue)? Over the years, I have looked up a lot of background songs that I hear while we are watching some movies on TV and I purchased them in the iTunes Store…. And somehow, I was able to search for something in my local music library, which is on my NAS drive. After I found the song, the only option was “to add song to the end of queue”, which was fine, and once they iron out the queue trouble, I should be able to reposition that song. I wish I could remember how I did that. I only remember that I did it on my Sonos Windows PC app and not on my iPad. Oh, and I just removed a number of songs from one of my playlists using the Sonos PC app. So as I mentioned in another post a few days ago, I rely on my PC app for a lot of things. When I bring up the app it still has the brown box with the black lettering. It is S2 version 16.2. I hope they don’t change that.

jgatie

Personal anecdote means nothing in the face of actual facts. The vast majority of content streamed on Sonos is via streaming. Local library use pales in comparison.

John Guarr

Enthusiast II

Personal anecdote means nothing in the face of actual facts. The vast majority of content streamed on Sonos is via streaming. Local library use pales in comparison.

Sorry to say, I have no interest in streaming music.

jgatie

Personal anecdote means nothing in the face of actual facts. The vast majority of content streamed on Sonos is via streaming. Local library use pales in comparison.

Sorry to say, I have no interest in streaming music.

Which is personal anecdote. The vast majority of Sonos users disagree.

S

sfinchler

Contributor I

I work for one of the 3 major music companies and yes, the streaming services definitely dominate over the physical space but so what? There are also a ton of local artists putting out great music that a lot of us have collected over the years, and that we used to search for and play on our Sonos systems. Why drop a perfectly good feature from the new app?

I’ll tell you why:

The streaming services need to know what you’re listening to. That’s how they know how well they’re doing and how they figure out who gets paid (artists, labels, etc.) and how much. It’s all based on the percentage of streams. If you listen to your own stuff they have no way to count that.

I’m not into conspiracy theories, but what if Spotify and Pandora told Sonos “don’t take away the option to play from a personal library; just make it a little harder so people play from the services instead”.

I definitely hope they come to their senses and let us search our libraries in the next update. It’s the right thing to do.

jgatie

Sonos has not dropped local libraries from the new app! A portion of Sonos users aren't seeing their local library due to Sonos dropping the supposedly insecure SMB v1 and HTTP sharing. There are dozens of threads discussing this, with steps to get a share onto SMB v2/v3. There's enough wrong with the app without going into conspiracy land.

S

Smartyfartblast

Lyricist II

Hello,

I am no lover of the new app. When I spoke to Sonos support they said the inability to search NAS libraries was a bug/flaw that was being rectified, I hope this turns out to be true. I also find the new app less intuitive, the volume bars are harder to use and you have to hit apply for some reason. I’d be happy with the older app back but we all know that isnt about to happen.

I also have an issue that Amazon Music doesnt play, seems to let you select the album then it just skips each track, does anyone else find that?

Looks like it is - https://support.sonos.com/en-us/article/the-new-sonos-app-and-future-feature-updates

Yes, the volume bars are very difficult to operate. They don’t respond half the time and you have to line up your finger just right.

Agree the new app is awful, especially the inability to search your own library. In my opinion the search engine has always been erratic and is now worse. Search and select from a streaming service and it plays something else. Weird and annoying.

P

Petrica

Lyricist III

I have been using Sonos for several years, and it is attached to a streaming service and my music library on a USB drive, which has years worth of accumulated music, including a lot not available on streaming. I have just (8 May) updated to the new Sonos app. Now I can still see and trawl through my music library, but cannot search in it. The general search function just returns the streaming and Sonos radio results, and there’s no dedicated search for the music library. This effectively cuts off my access to my own music, by making it prohibitively difficult to find anything. Please bring this functionality back. I know you want to prioritise revenue generation, but this is disrespectful to your customers.

sonos is taking it's time to do something. I bought sonos 10 years ago for two reasons… itit was intuitive and it play my own music stored in my house. after a crapy soft migration do any of those 2 things survived?

and do you know how long it took them to provide their original soft of the ability to see your previous search or played songs? years!!!!! customer is last with sonos.

S

sfinchler

Contributor I

Sonos has not dropped local libraries from the new app! A portion of Sonos users aren't seeing their local library due to Sonos dropping the supposedly insecure SMB v1 and HTTP sharing. There are dozens of threads discussing this, with steps to get a share onto SMB v2/v3. There's enough wrong with the app without going into conspiracy land.

@jgatie No offense intended and as I said I’m definitely not into conspiracy theories. In my case I can access my local library, I just can’t search for things. Searching used to be great. It would return top results from my services with an easy button to get more, plus it showed results from my library. The new app totally lost the ability to search my library. Still hoping they listen to all of us and get a new app out quickly.

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