New app does not display music library album art

Sonos has gone to ****.  They've completely forgotten about the older, legacy, users and instead focussing on a new breed of users who don't know what they've missed

Moderator Note: Modified in accordance with the Community Code of Conduct.

Sonos just ruined a Memorial Day weekend party at our shore house. Planned music for months to control from my mobile chair. Thanks 😡

I’m sorry, but i think you have missed the real issue here :

Prior to the App update, the Album Art on my Android phone worked perfectly.

Now it doesn’t.

Nothing to do with a temporary issue in my opinion, nor any of your suggestions to fix it.

Album Art still appears correctly on the latest Desktop App, picking up from the same NAS files that worked perfectly with the old Android App.

As it does on my iPad following the latest App update. 

I am not alone in raising this issue and I am sure the Sonos App team are fully aware of the issue.

What I haven’t seen on the new App “improvement”/bug fix  roadmap is any mention of Album Art.

Moderator edit: Quoted post removed due to being spam

It is not possible that this app had any organized testing of all supported music sources on all supported platforms. Further, I assert that it had no alpha nor beta in the field with a subset of real users covering all supported music sources on all supported platforms. I defy anyone at Sonos to refute me by providing their test plan docs. I will eat crow if I'm wrong. However, that will beg the question of why it was still released with so many defects. 

QUESTION for y’all on the Android app: do your “Sonos Favorites” of local library music work?
Mine are “grayed out” and I cannot tap on them. They show correctly and work correctly in the iOS app.

And ditto all of the folks above: local library music never shows album art in the Android app, while it appears fine in the iOS app.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Mysteriously this morning my music library appeared on my iPhone mobile app and worked properly.   🎉 However about an hour later my music library disappeared, only to reappear later in the day.  🤔  To say the app is unstable, at least at this point, isn’t an exaggeration.   As for album cover art; music I purchased online and downloaded has album art.  Music is loaded into my music library from CDs do not have album art.  I can live without the art.   

The technician I reached after on hold for an hour was helpful, pleasant and got it working.   As it stands I have hope I won’t need a technician again. 🤞
 

Mark
 

Den nye appen trenger en sikkelig gjennomgang. Etter oppdateringen synes jeg appen i seg selv har blitt mer oversiktlig og snarveiene til ønsket app veldig tilgjengelig. Men når man skal begynne å spille av på en høytaler eller sone så velger appen uansett en fast høytaler, og i mitt tilfelle så er denne høytaleren på et av soverommet til min unge. Den må først starte å spille der før jeg kan legge til andre soner for å så velge bort soverommet. Dette er veldig irriterende. Tør ikke å spille av på kvelden i frykt for å vekke ungen. Eller er det noe jeg ikke skjønner og fjør feil?? 

Moderator edit:
Google Translate-

The new app needs a thorough review. After the update, I think the app itself has become more clear and the shortcuts to the desired app very accessible. But when you start playing on a speaker or zone, the app chooses a fixed speaker anyway, and in my case this speaker is in one of my youngster's bedrooms. It must first start playing there before I can add other zones to then deselect the bedroom. This is very annoying. Do not dare to play at night for fear of waking the child. Or is there something I don't understand and am doing wrong??

Hi @Johnny Rico , you are clearly very concerned about Album Art as I have come across a thread you started a year ago on this subject, and there are probably others; I hope you got your issues sorted back then so you could enjoy your Album Art for at least a while before the downgrade to V80.x hit.

Like you I’m an Android user and like you I have been a bit obsessive about curating the Album Art and tagging my 14k music files (FLAC).  Like yours, most of my art is 600x600; I use Folder.jpg files for all folders but, with compilation albums, I also embed art in each track related to the track’s artist. I keep my library on a Synology NAS as you do.  So I very much appreciate and share the disappointment that V80 brought with it; I too have rolled back to V16.1 and continue to enjoy almost all of the original functionality - the search and queue management issues being the glaring issues, but they are for other threads - and a system which is very responsive and pretty much 100% rock solid.  At least I can see my Album Art!

What really pi**es me off is that, from what I’ve seen in other threads, the iOS app update which came out this morning has brought local Album Art back on display and reinstated at least part of the search/queue management/playlist function.  I thought the same might apply to the Android app so I did an update to check it out, found that neither of these had happened and rolled back to V16 where it all works as it “should”.

As far as I’m concerned Album Art is a big factor, particularly where, as in the Controller app, it takes up a lot of the screen and is a real feature although in the WebApp it is so small as to be almost invisible despite appearing in two locations. What I cannot understand is why, if the system can fill those frames with art brought down from the cloud when you’re playing tracks from a service, it can’t grab images from the files sitting right next door on your local network and which it is actually playing with no problems.  And it can’t do it whether the art is embedded in the file or in the approved Folder.jpg format.

I am resigned to hanging in with my Sonos system of 7 players, which I would really rather not have to pay to replace, in the hope that the coders, who must be going crazy trying to sort out this mess, can bring back the central functions we have had since day 1.  As an Album Art obsessive, giving that back would make me much less unhappy.  When can we expect it?

Hi @press250 I checked this out while obsessing about Album Art and both Playlists and saved Songs do show up in the Sonos Favourites section as grayed out with no art.  But, at least on the tablet I run the black controller on (now V80,02.05, 3 June), I can click through and then send the playlist/song to a speaker as expected.

One of my playlists has a mixture of tracks from my local library and a cloud service.  They all play fine but the cloud tracks bring the art with them and the local ones don’t.  Huh??

And yes, I can confirm that art doesn’t show up anywhere in the Android app, and I’ve looked most everywhere.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯  indeed! What were they thinking?

@jreddaway, I did get my album art to display properly most of the time. On one of those old threads, I got some great help in diagnosing a dump of my system, and some good advice on rearranging my speakers to not sit next to other devices that gave off interference, such as phones and other electronics. Most of my speakers were indeed co-located next to other devices, and making some placement adjustments did a world of good. That said, I do still find annoying times when that stupid default logo is shown for one or two tracks during playback. I have resigned myself that whereas album art display was  always completely rock solid, those days are mysteriously gone and I’m happy when I hear a great tune and pick up the phone and switch to the app to gaze at the album art, it shows properly most of the time.

I’m a retired software developer; not on mobile platforms but on Windows. There was one right way to roll this app out in order to respect the installed base of customers, and that was to put it out while retaining the existing apps. If that had been done, it would not have been an issue to leave out features initially and add them back over time. If you want to move people off the legacy app, you make the new one compelling, and they’ll switch. Over time, you can finally retire the legacy app when the new app provides all the functionality of the old one. To completely replace the legacy app with one that is missing key functionality from the get-go is just not done and a guaranteed way to infuriate your installed base. It is hubris of a level seldom seen but they did it and they own the fallout.

I am afraid that whereas people like you and I were once Sonos’ target customer, we are no longer. The new app seems completely targeted towards streaming customers. Whereas you and I and many others have 5 or 10 speakers in our homes and lovingly curated music libraries that represent the soundtracks of our lives, I picture the new Sonos target customer to be someone with one speaker (probably a Roam at that!) who only streams Spotify. 

How Sonos can make the decision to cater to such a non-committed customer over those of us who have spent literally, literally thousands of dollars on their products over many years is a product marketing plan that is too elusive for me to understand. But I’ll tell you this: we are moving to a new house in a month and I had been planning to take the occasion to finally replace my old school home theater system (receiver and 5.1 physical speaker setup) with one of the Sonos home theater designs, likely an Arc, Sub and 2 Eras. I was going to spend $1800 on this. Past tense. That plan is no more. I’d have to be an idiot to make that sort of investment after the debacle of that new app. Can things change? They can, but I’ll have to be persuaded and thus far I’m not.