NAS drive / Sonos / MacBook Air advice

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
May 20, 2025
3 replies
147 views

My Bufflow NAS drive stopped working due to SMB(!) issues, but did work perfectly with Windows 11 to stream music, approx 18 months/2yrs ago. I have since purchased MacBook Air laptop and need to purchase a new NAS drive to transfer music for iCloud, to again stream. I’d appreciate anyone who’s done this, advising which NAS drive they are using, I’m ok with reasonably simple setups, but nothing too complicated…. I don’t expect recommendations but would like to know what works with MacBook and SONOS… all a bit of a minefield…. Thanks in advance

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Best answer by Cosmic54

My music is currently on the iCloud as there’s so much of it, do you know if you can point the Sonos at it through the Mac as I can’t seem to achieve this? If there’s a link somewhere on this site to this info, please advise, and I’ll go search for it, thanks for your help. Anna

Airgetlam

I’m currently using an old WD NAS, but pretty much any NAS, assuming it allows you to set SMB connections (some of the old, cheaper versions of WD NAS don’t, I think…), should work fine. I have both a MacBook Pro of a vintage, and a MacBook Air connected to it, along with a Windows 11 device, and of course my Sonos.

You could easily start without an NAS, and just point your Sonos to the Mac’s storage, by following the instructions in the FAQ. Then repointing Sonos to your NAS after you’ve moved the music to there. Again, by setting it up via the information in the Sonos FAQ. When the music is moved to the NAS, it means the Mac no longer has to be ‘on’ for the Sonos to reach the data.

Remember, use of the Sonos S1 controller and firmware requires the older (and likely harder to use on the NAS/Mac given its deprecation in general) SMB v1 and concurrent NTML in order to access the data on the computer or NAS. The S2 controller is much more forgiving for users these days, and allows the use of SMB v2 or v3.x, which usually doesn’t require messing with the originating device, either the Mac or the NAS.

Bruce

C

Cosmic54AuthorAnswer

Contributor I

My music is currently on the iCloud as there’s so much of it, do you know if you can point the Sonos at it through the Mac as I can’t seem to achieve this? If there’s a link somewhere on this site to this info, please advise, and I’ll go search for it, thanks for your help. Anna

Airgetlam

Not directly to iCloud, Sonos has always had difficulty reaching that sort of data. Not sure why it’s materially different than Apple Music stored data, but I’m no programmer, either. All ‘local library’ files that Sonos can play are stored directly on the Hard Drive, and not in the cloud.

Bruce

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