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Whiskers
Contributor I
October 5, 2019
Answered

Sonos and Mac OS 10.15 Catalina

Tried using Sonos with Golden Master of Catalina and its a no go. When I add my music library on an external drive it does so normally but NO songs in the folder are recognized. Wonder if it has to do with Music being the new app for music instead of iTunes?I was able to see music added if it was on the internal drive of the machine.
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      Ryan S
      Ryan SAnswer
      Retired Sonos Staff
      December 17, 2019

      Hi everyone, as BowlerBrown just mentioned above, there were some changes made in the Sonos 10.6 software for Catalina compatibility. If you haven’t tested it out yet, go ahead and make sure you’re all up to date, and then you should be able to add your music library and find your updated playlists. There are steps here to update your music library in the Sonos app. Let us know if you see any trouble and I’ll get the feedback to the team.

      If you’re still having trouble with your playlists, check out this guide for some troubleshooting suggestions as well.

      Mark good posts by pressing the like button, and select the best answer on questions you've asked to help others find solutions.
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      176 replies

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      keng223
      Contributor II
      October 13, 2019
      I cannot get ANYTHING to play either from my cell phone app or my desktop. How does one go about fixing THIS problem? Apple Music or Bugs.net... or any music service.
      JakeR
      Lyricist III
      October 13, 2019
      Hi. All music is on my NAS, including the downloads of all music I have from Apple Music. With Catalina I had similar issues to some of the writers here, but succeeded in pointing Music to the right subfolder on my NAS and have all copies of songs moved there. Only one issue left (besides the xlms playlist issue...): sonos does not see or read all the downloaded apple music songs as they are in M4P format which Sonos apparently cannot read... what now? Anyone has the same issue?
      thx in advance for any input.
      Airgetlam
      Airgetlam
      October 13, 2019
      Way back, many years ago (yes, my tongue is slightly in my cheek), Apple included DRM in all their files, which meant that Sonos couldn't read them. at some point (3 or 4 years ago?), Apple stopped doing that, but it didn't automatically change the files if you'd already downloaded them. I had a certain number of them in my library.

      What you probably need to do is delete your local files, and then download fresh copies from Apple. The fresh copies will not have DRM in them (unless the artist has demanded it, there are still some that I think have DRM associated with them, but not many).

      Try that, and see if it works.
      Bruce
        slothinker
        Lyricist II
        October 14, 2019
        Just upgraded to Catalina; such a mistake. I find that if I move an album to my iMac's root drive (where System lives), Sonos is able to find it. Unfortunately my Music library is on a different HD drive connected to the iMac. Apple's Music app (formerly iTunes) has no trouble finding the music but despite futzing with permissions for the directories and drive and recommended changes to Security settings, I have not found the trick that would enable the Sonos App to recognize my album/song files.
          JakeR
          Lyricist III
          October 14, 2019
          Way back, many years ago (yes, my tongue is slightly in my cheek), Apple included DRM in all their files, which meant that Sonos couldn't read them. at some point (3 or 4 years ago?), Apple stopped doing that, but it didn't automatically change the files if you'd already downloaded them. I had a certain number of them in my library.

          What you probably need to do is delete your local files, and then download fresh copies from Apple. The fresh copies will not have DRM in them (unless the artist has demanded it, there are still some that I think have DRM associated with them, but not many).

          Try that, and see if it works.

          Thanks Bruce! All songs bought on iTunes are not an issue, however I subscribed to Apple Music a couple of months ago, and all songs I have downloaded from there are M4P and protected. So the copies are fresh but not readable by Sonos if I want to play them from my NAS...
          Airgetlam
          Airgetlam
          October 14, 2019
          If they’re Apple Music songs, can’t you just add Apple Music to Sonos, and have Sonos reach out to Apple’s servers to play the files, rather than trying to play the local files?

          I think the issue is that you haven’t “purchased” those songs, but instead have access as long as your subscription exists. When you play via iTunes (or Music), the app goes out and checks your subscription status from Apple, and allows playback. I think if you add your credentials to the Sonos app, it will be able to check the subscription status, and allow you to play that music from the cloud, at the least. I’m honestly not sure how that would work for downloaded files.
          Bruce
          pomm4tous
          Avid Contributor I
          October 14, 2019

          This was helpful. Granting full disk access to SonosLibraryServer and to Sonos.app restored the visibility of my music library within Sonos.

          Now we’ll wait and see if Sonos comes up with a solution for imported playlists.

          Thanks.

          JakeR
          Lyricist III
          October 14, 2019
          If they’re Apple Music songs, can’t you just add Apple Music to Sonos, and have Sonos reach out to Apple’s servers to play the files, rather than trying to play the local files?

          I think the issue is that you haven’t “purchased” those songs, but instead have access as long as your subscription exists. When you play via iTunes (or Music), the app goes out and checks your subscription status from Apple, and allows playback. I think if you add your credentials to the Sonos app, it will be able to check the subscription status, and allow you to play that music from the cloud, at the least. I’m honestly not sure how that would work for downloaded files.

           

          I do indeed have the credential for Apple Music in my Sonos.

          Well, yes to what you say with the following limitations:

          • Sonos times out and gives a 1002 error when I want to shuffle all my music via Apple Music… Just because I have many songs… whereas when they are on my NAS library Sonos can shuffle the full library.
          • Apple Music on Sonos therefore has to be played through playlists of approx less than 500 songs. Ah wait (just being a bit sarcastic...), when you make a playlist now in Music, because of the dropped support for XML files you can’t see them in Sonos, so would have to make Sonos playlists just for playing my music on Sonos. When I then take my iPod on holidays to play on our Bose bluetooth speaker, I can’t use Sonos and hence not the playlists I had to create on Sonos. It can of course all be done by duplicating the work in creating playlists both on Sonos and on Apple Music, but I really have better things to do than doing everything twice.
          • By the way, did not have that problem when Sonos supported reading music directly from the iPod. I would download all music automatically to the iPod, and even the protected files from Apple Music would be readable by Sonos. The same files on the NAS or not readable by Sonos…

          Sonos does need to do some serious work on these issues. For some obscure reason before Catalina, I had my iTunes library on the NAS, including all downloaded songs from Apple Music, and Sonos could read all the songs from the NAS, including Apple Music downloads...

          dlbroughton
          Trending Lyricist I
          October 14, 2019

          This was helpful. Granting full disk access to SonosLibraryServer and to Sonos.app restored the visibility of my music library within Sonos.

          Now we’ll wait and see if Sonos comes up with a solution for imported playlists.

          Thanks.

          After granting access I had full access to my music library and my imported playlists. If your xml file isn't there perhaps you can recover it from a pre Catalibackup?

            slothinker
            Lyricist II
            October 14, 2019

            Just a quick note as I previous complained about being unable to use my Sonos Play:1 with my on-disk albums under Catalina (iMac 2017). Turns out that this is a problem specific to the external HD I was using. I moved the same Music library to another HD (both SSD by the way) and the Sonos app found all my albums. Music again sounds great.

            (previous gripe below)

            Just upgraded to Catalina; such a mistake. I find that if I move an album to my iMac's root drive (where System lives), Sonos is able to find it. Unfortunately my Music library is on a different HD drive connected to the iMac. Apple's Music app (formerly iTunes) has no trouble finding the music but despite futzing with permissions for the directories and drive and recommended changes to Security settings, I have not found the trick that would enable the Sonos App to recognize my album/song files.

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