The dinosaur SONOS refuses to connect to cutting edge NAS

Hi @welshmanofsteel 

Welcome to the Sonos Community!

I don’t have any personal experience with TrueNAS, but the only step you’ve missed out that I know you’ll need is enabling SMBv1 on your NAS drive for Sonos to access it.

If your shared folder is in Plex, you can add Plex to Sonos as a source - thus negating the need for setting up SMB. You would need internet for your music to play, however.

Perhaps someone in the community who has used TrueNAS can help?

Many thanks - I had set up SMB 1 on freenas as well as added the aux parm.

Plex streams music freenas/ Sonos - but that is a hack. The lazy folk in Sonos dev team need to wake up and recognise that true home Nas setups are going to be a deal breaker for their product

I really don’t think the lack of proper NAS support will bother too many Sonos customers. The target market is millennial types most of whom don’t have a music collection and just stream their music from Spotify, Apple Music or whatever. They have no need for a NAS to serve up music.

I got my QNAP NAS working with my Sonos speakers by installing BubbleUPnP server on the NAS and creating OpenHome renderers for the Sonos speakers. All that involves is ticking a checkbox. That gives me proper gapless playback from the NAS and means I can also use alternative apps to control the Sonos, not just the Sonos app.

Wow, with such a motivational post I’m sure developers are skipping their way to work to fix this, just for you. 🙄

Maybe not, but it does work fine with NAS devices that support SMB1 - I have it working on SMB1 on a sacrificial NAS as I write. I have also had it working on a Synology using SMB1 in the past, although it’s now locked down.

So it would appear that it does work with SMB1 on a real NAS, you’re just having problems getting it to work with True NAS. Perhaps you should be looking for support in the True NAS forums rather than here, as it doesn’t sound like a Sonos issue.

Well, quite… It has become clear that, for years now, NAS users are not the target market for Sonos, and NAS facilities are very unlikely to be improved, IMHO.

You’ve found a way round it, I have my own preferred solution and there are also other options that some forum users recommend.

I think that we just have to accept that Sonos is no longer the ‘goto’ company for NAS users and move on - in whichever way works best for each individual.

I realized long ago the corner Sonos had painted themselves into on SMB. I don’t think fix for them will be cheap or easy and may be a long time coming.

My solution is using a dedicated Sonos NAS, or even cheaper a NAS to SMBv1 gateway. Either runs well on a Raspberry Pi Zero W. https://stan-miller.livejournal.com/

Someday Sonos will make the change but for now I have my music without putting my main NAS at risk from SMB v1 problems for under $50.00.

@bockersjv - it’s not my role as a customer and an investor in SONOS to motivate a lazy dev team.

 However as an investor I can rasie it  during shareholders meetings.

 Too many customers role over and simply accept the bullshit the corporations pump out.

Looking at the chat rooms here SMB is a major issue this company refuses to  address.

I do not ask SONOS to remove SMB1 and switch off their “older” units. Instead, myself and the myriad of other users wanting to use NAS as NAS is intended to be used  - natively and not via third party  hacks, is SONOS to support  support additional SMB protocols. 

The scale this topic has reached, the  resolute silence and the manner in which SONOS shut the conversations down,   makes me think that SONOS is abusing SMB1. By  adopting the later, more secure  protocols, is going to remove that power to abuse. By abuse I think in terms of how other corporations abuse their access in order to “harvest” more information than we think they are already harvesting and selling onwards for profit. 

The lack of later SMB support has been raised numerous times on this and earlier platforms, and I don’t recall Sonos ever closing down any of those threads - however critical.

It has been suggested many times that the problem is the lack of memory on earlier units. It seems the most likely reason and, if so, Sonos cannot do anything about it without killing off old units. If it were a viable option, they’d have probably done it by now. It is very disappointing that they didn’t base S2 on a newer version of the kernel, though. At the same time they could have massively increased the number of tracks and store capacity - but they chose not to, 

As has already been mentioned, people who stream from a NAS are (according to Sonos) a tiny percentage of their customer base. I don’t use any of the streaming services - I’ve tried some of them and found them lacking for classical music - so all of my listening is via a NAS. I’ve had to accept that Sonos couldn’t care less whether or not I walk - not only am I in a tiny minority, but because I find Sonos inadequate for my particular purposes I’m unlikely to buy many (? any) more units. I don’t like their throwaway approach to tech, either.

If you’re concerned about security, there are options available to you. I use a sacrificial NAS. @Stanley_4 uses a gateway. @Kumar uses an Echo device successfully. My backup plan is a Chromecast Audio into the back of a Play 5, which can then feed all other Sonos devices. This can also play high res file and can handle all of my files - not just a subset.

As for your suggestion that Sonos is deliberately enforcing obsolete protocols in order to harvest our data, I don’t know what to suggest…. but I doubt that your assumption is correct.

I am happily ignorant about this SMB stuff, but I use the Echo for its album art features for streaming services. Some time after I started using my Echo Show 5 for this, I learnt how to set up an app on a Raspberry PI that can serve music from a USB stick plugged into it, and play it on Sonos via the Echo Show 5 with voice commanded start, and also with album art. This set up also plays higher bit file formats that Sonos does not, but I don’t know if that is making any difference in sound quality.

Presumably, I am not exposed to security issues. I tend to not bother about these where my home audio kit is concerned, and I don’t really care if the world learns about my music preferences. 

PS: One does need Sonos kit with a line in jack for this.