Personal music library features removed in the new May 7 2024 app version

Gah!! I just spent an hour of my Saturday trying to add my music library on NAS only to fail. What has Sonos done? They are my speakers, not theirs. 

Another pissed customer here. The latest Sonos app on my iPhone can’t find my music library on my NAS drive anymore. I bought the system because of this feature and now it is gone. I should have my money back.

Allegedly, Sonos say that this will be fixed with an update in June. However, my question remains, why would Sonos knowingly put out this latest update with this huge dysfunctional issue, of not being able to access a computer’s iTunes music library? My suspicion is that they were/are testing the waters for the app to be exclusively geared towards streaming services. It all seems to be a bit insidious. I hope I’m wrong!! I have over 3k of music that I am currently locked out of on my numerous Sonos devices.

Besides their own Sonos Radio, Sonos makes no income from streaming services.  Don’t suspect conspiracy when the answer is right in front of your face.  This release was rushed because they needed to push out the new headphones and Roam 2 in time for the end of the fiscal year.  That’s a far more reasonable (but still stupid) motive than Sonos wanting to push people towards streaming services it makes no money from. 

That’s true, but Sonos probably also made the conscious decision not to direct resources towards an increasingly small segment of the market (NAS users) and to instead focus those resources where the growth potential is (streaming users).

Not even that.  Sonos caved to the few, but loud, posters in the long standing threads preaching doom and gloom over the use of SMB v1, despite there never being a documented case of any Sonos device being hacked due to SMB v1.  That’s 95% of the users who lost access to their local libraries.  The other 5% is probably the network errors we see every update due to wonky router allocation tables.  

  They say they will have this personal library function back up by mid-June. Why would this take 6 weeks? It is entirely possible they are working through the programming and legal process of encrypting our music files to a Sonos only format network wide like iTunes did. The encryption program will likely be installed to run independent of the Sonos App and have a “corrective” program that will upload and reinstall the encryption if it is disabled. This way they can hold our music for ransom or even ruin/delete our music libraries. Sonos has demonstrated they are both capable and willing to take ownership of our systems and to force us to use kiddie-play marketing streaming services. You might as well grow a man bun and use a pair of cheap wired ear buds.

  While my Sonos system in its current state in not useable, I have taken the opportunity to tidy up my audio files and move them to a Linux machine and a cold (i.e. unplugged) drive. I will use a laptop that has never run Sonos to download any more music. This way, Sonos can encrypt all they like and never have access to my master library files. In the meantime, I am searching for a Linux based alternative like Kubi.

I did manage to find a workaround to get back access to my music library. My NAS is a WD MyCoud, already running Plex so I can stream to my home cinema amp. After the Sonos update which removed the music library function I just added Plex as a service in the Sonos app (it's in the list of streaming services) and have got full access back that way, it is a bit slow to respond, but at least it works 😁

Yes, nice that SONOS provided ZERO alert that my giant apple-music curated AIFF CD library would no longer be available to load for my SONOS music library after updating the app, etc. I got a cryptic DIY to reconstitute the connection from their chat, but it didn’t work, as I am not a code writer, etc. 

Currently, I use airplay to listen to my CD library. Somewhat kludgy, but I’m not paying for any music services when I have 1000+ albums I love/like, all ripped for CD-quality playback… in a perfect playback world.

Terrible that an auto-upgrade would downgrade core features.

This was premeditated, no amount of posturing could say it wasn’t.

If they want people to have a streaming function priority and remove a music library feature then rename the old/new app and release them separately. Better than pissing off (a million) uncountable users..