New app does not display music library album art

the phone & windows app updates lost connection to my music library.  Was a very happy happy happy chappy now super unhappy and want to chuck the speakers out of my house into the rain outside… hate them so much now..  totally unhappy.

Yes @Johnny Rico , you and I are both veritable dinosaurs in the new Sonos universe with our old-fashioned local focus and our wish to curate and enjoy our own collections of music.

You, as a former software developer, must find it excruciating to watch this slow-motion train smash grind along; I, as a former marketing guy, just cannot comprehend how this ever got approved although I think the key thing is your observation that “I picture the new Sonos target customer to be someone with one speaker (probably a Roam at that!) who only streams Spotify”, which I have been thinking for quite a while now. 

The whole design of the Black App and, even more so, of the WebApp points in this direction. A couple of examples among the many I keep noticing are that there is no real Now Playing screen with album art etc in the Web App, just a little bar with controls on it across the bottom of the screen and tiny cover art (if you’re streaming, but not from local content!) there and in the tile for the current player over on the right.  If you just stream media you probably do it through a phone in your pocket or purse, so why would you be interested in a decorative screen?  If you don’t have a local library to play from, why would you be concerned by the lags imposed by having to send the data involved (and perhaps this is where the album art comes in) up to Sonos’ servers and back to get it to your screen? Or by the security issues this creates which many people are concerned about? There are many, many other things that just aren’t there for us dinosaurs and probably never will be, but I’m sure this is the model for the Sonos UI and the UX behind it from now on.

My pet theory is that Patrick Spence was so traumatised by the demise of BlackBerry, where he was the marketing chief but bailed out before the proverbial really hit the fan, that he is overdoing the management of change at Sonos in an attempt to avoid what happened there.  I came across an interesting reference here

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/062315/blackberry-story-constant-success-failure.asp

which has some telling comments about how a company lost its way when, from a rather smug position of market dominance, it was faced with rapid change in the form of the technical progress which prompted the first generation of real smartphones, which ate its lunch very quickly before it could adapt. 

I think Spence, who will surely have an enormous amount of hard data about both how the owners of the installed base of Sonos players use it and what current sales and research say about where demand is heading in real time, has determined that the corporate future lies with precisely the customer base you described.  He and his marketing people have crunched the numbers and decided to make what they see as the inevitable change from local to cloud based content now in one fell swoop.  If what he knows for sure is the minuscule number of dinosaurs with their old fashioned use case don't like it, tough. We can talk about hubris, arrogance etc but he’s made the big call and what we’re seeing is the implementation of a slash-and-burn marketing plan through which he hopes to avoid taking Sonos down the BlackBerry road while we just fade away if he ignores us for long enough. And making rollbacks available would be sign of weakness in accommodating the dinosaurs, so I for one don’t expect to see that happen. Incidentally, I’ve been interested to see a lot of ads for discounts on Sonos hardware in the last couple of weeks.  All part of that big plan, no doubt.

Well, good luck to them with that. 

I’m going to keep an eye on how the Black App develops, watching for it to regain enough functionality to be worth moving over to (exactly the point you mentioned where users transition because it’s worth doing) and then try to lock things down till my hardware dies.  Until then it’s the Gold App for me.

As for you, which way are you going to go with starting to wean yourself off Sonos in your new place? BlueSound for that home theatre setup looks like a good start….

Cheers

John

@jreddaway, I understand how this must have went down all too well 😁 Although the first instinct is to blame the developers, it seems much more likely to me that the leadership pushed them to release without adequate time to complete functionality and most importantly, to test. They had a date (I’ve seen others around here assert that it was the date of the headphone release), and it had to ship, no matter what state the software was in. As the old saw goes, it takes 9 months to make a baby no matter how many women you put on the job.

I only recently learned of the Sonos/Blackberry connection, and as it happens, a couple months ago, watched the recent Blackberry movie. It’s quite good; a docu-comedy-drama that tracks the rise and fall. As someone who worked in startups for most of my career, I found it particularly spot-on and hilarious. Highly recommended!

Currently, I have gone back to the prior app and regained my system as I knew it, but I am wondering how long this can go on. I have to take care not to allow the app to get updated, which is easy enough if not an ongoing pain from the perspective of the Play store. The bigger fear I have is that the app itself prompts to do an update, which I think is a speaker firmware update. I can prevent the Android app itself from updating via the Play store, but if I slip up within the app (or the Windows app, which I also use) and let it update the speaker firmware, I think it may well break backwards compatibility with the old app, and then there will be no recourse but to move to the new app.

I currently run the new app on my tablet and an old phone. I did this on the theory that I could monitor progress on the new app and determine when and if it becomes usable. However, because it is prompting to do an update, and I’m ignoring that for reasons outlined above, that plan is not working at all and I’m not seeing whatever updates have occurred.

I’m currently thinking that I should remove a speaker from my existing system, and use it to create a second, entirely separate 1-speaker system in my house, using the new app in this mini system. That way I could allow the app to update the firmware on the single speaker and really see how the app changes without risking the stability of my overall system. I just started looking into how one would go about doing this. I do have a second Wi-Fi SSID in my house, and various old spare computers in my basement, so I think it should be doable. It is rather a pain to have to go to such lengths, though.

I did take a brief look at BlueSound and it looks pretty interesting, need to delve into it further. I’ve seen so many posts here where people say they are selling or have sold all their speakers already. I’m pretty risk-adverse and that’s far too fast for me to move! I will have to think and research for a long time before I’m comfortable enough to make such a big move. But, I could certainly see myself dipping a toe into the water by buying a single BlueSound speaker and setting up a small test system. I have spent an enormous amount of time and effort to build my music library and it is an important part of my life (sort of the kind of idea that Sonos used to say they cared about). I have to be open to the idea that this debacle may be the universe telling me that it’s time to move on from Sonos.  

Hi again, @Johnny Rico .

I continue to wonder about where to go from the deep hole Sonos have dropped us in and have been experimenting with Plex, which I found unsatisfactory, probably because I didn’t really understand it, and now Roon.

I have to say that my first impressions are very favourable indeed.  It installed simply, indexed my library very quickly and - most important! - immediately picked up all my Sonos players and was streaming to them with full control within minutes of starting the installation.  It has an astonishing range of data integration capabilities which make Sonos look very basic indeed and it even has full search functions as well as queue and playlist management!  Quite a novelty after recent Sonos experience.

There are, of course, things that are not perfect; it distinguishes between Sonos products which are “Roon Ready” and those which aren’t and, while it groups units in the same category just fine, it won’t group across the categories.  It does unexpected things with album art in circumstances which I don’t yet understand, but at least you can see it! There will no doubt be other things which emerge along the learning curve, but I am well impressed at this stage.

I guess it’s the difference between a hardware company struggling with software and a pure software play, as both their UI and their UX are way more sophisticated, powerful and polished than Sonos’.

The big thing, of course, is that it’s a subscription service.  I have taken up the 14-day introductory offer and will continue to explore Roon while I wait and see how Sonos progress in winning back my trust as I would stay with them if they sort out the Android interface properly.  I have a feeling though that if they force us into a subscription model as many seem to expect, I will end up with Roon.  My concern for the medium term is that Sonos might modify the firmware in the speakers to exclude Roon.  I’ll have to be careful about locking down.

You might like to have a look at it on the free trial basis.  Nothing to lose!  

Cheers

John

Yip iPad has album covers. Android phone does not. What are s9nos saying about this, anyone know?

Nothing. Surprised?

@jreddaway, I am finding out that I’ve been living under a rock; first BlueSound and now Roon! I am embarrassed to say that I really haven’t been paying attention and I thought Sonos was the only game in town for a whole-house music system. I took a cursory look at Roon and of the two, seems the most appealing because I could continue to use my existing substantial investment in Sonos speakers; buying 10 BlueSound speakers was a daunting idea. 

I also have not been paying attention in terms of Sonos speakers being usable as a destination source for other music players, such as Windows Media Player and PlexAmp. I have long noticed that my Sonos speakers are shown in Windows Explorer and also in Windows Media Player, but I pretty much ignored them. But after seeing a post elsewhere here pointing out that they can be destinations, I looked into it and presto! I was able to play (cast) music to my Sonos speakers from my PlexAmp Android app. It was a revelation that I should have figured out long ago, doh!

I do have Plex as well; it points to the same music library on my Synology NAS that Sonos does. I use Plex to play my music in my car via Android Auto and PlexAmp, which I love. Because I had Sonos for home use I had not bothered to consider Plex for that. I previously tried using Plex as a source through Sonos, but found it laggy and decided there was no particular reason to do it, since I could just access my music library directly. I think it was laggy because rather than streaming Plex directly from my home network, I believe Plex was sending my music up to the cloud and then back down to Sonos. I have since upgraded my Plex server from a very old box to a fast new box, so I think the performance would be good now, but still little reason to bother with it. Except I guess it would show the music art 😁

I will definitely install Roon and give it a try. It sort of sounds like Roon is a company where Sonos was in 2006 when I discovered it via this article. The subscription cost is daunting, that’s for sure. If it wraps up everything in a bow with a great UI as you say, it could be really compelling for me. I mean I’ve been yapping about how important my music library is to me. I might have to put my money where my mouth is 😁

I do not know a lot about it, but I think the reason that Sonos speakers are able to be destinations for other systems such as Roon is that they are DLNA compliant. Since that is an industry open standard, I would think that it would be a major no-no for Sonos to move to bar Roon or any other systems from accessing their speakers.

Sonos speakers are not DLNA (or UPnP) compliant. There’s a thin layer of UPnP at the network level for discovery—why you see your Sonos devices on a Windows machine—but the protocol above that is proprietary. I plugged away at this for some time as I hoped to cast from Audirvana (which supports DLNA and UPnP) to my Sonos system.

I don’t know if Roon took an informal route (à la SonoPhone) or has an agreement with Sonos. In either case, maintaining that connectivity relies on some degree of ‘goodwill’.

Aha, thanks for that info. It certainly gives one pause! 

Teamwork, my good Johnny, we’re here for the teamwork!

Your instincts are very much aligned with my own: DNLA endpoints promise a better degree of long-term stability than anything using a vendor-specific protocol.

Beyond DLNA-compliant speakers, consider something like the WiiM Mini paired with high-quality (not wireless) self-powered speaker(s); it supports DLNA and AirPlay 2. Stepping up to the WiiM Pro adds Chromecast Audio and is Roon Ready. This is very likely the route I’ll take to cast from Audirvana.