Why have I have lost access to my music library on both Sonos S1 and S2 products?

Fully agree with your comments. I'm in the same position.

Well, I tried calling technical support today about this issue and was informed it would be a 65 minute wait on hold. I am guessing Sonos must be really swamped dealing with the fallout from the recent “updates”. I didn’t bother waiting so I guess I will have to be patient and trust that Sonos is aware of the music library issue and is dealing with it. Hopefully there will be a patch that fixes this soon.

In my opinion Sonos has done this intentionally in order to collect a license fee from services like Amazon Music, Spotify, Plex and so forth.  By doing this they are FORCING their own clients to abbandon their paid for music collections and pay a monthly fee to streaming platforms.  Then the kick-back to Sonos occurs.

Thing is I am a streamer and I am not updating the app and am looking at replacing the system so it will backfire in other ways 

I stream play vinyl and I use my astell and kern player to play my digital music using line input 

what I find strange is they seemed to have moved everything to the cloud and they sold SVC as secure non cloud voice control unmonitored and unrecorded notso long ago

so what changed now you have to to change volume via the cloud and control your entire system and playlists on servers?

The Emperor’s New Clothes and the BBC TV sitcom “Yes Minister” come to mind.

I have been an early adopter of SONOS, initially purchasing Gen1 Play 5 and Play 3 as both stereo pairs, then play bar and sub and play1s. 

Extremely disappointed with SONOS when they tried to force purchases of GEN2 products by bricking GEN1 speakers. However on that occasion SONOS responded to customer dissatisfaction by reversing this and allowing GEN1 products to continue working.

Given the expense of SONOS products I would expect that they last at least as long as passive speakers from the days of analog/analogue tech. Not so. Both my Play3s have died and there is no direct or third party repair support from SONOS.

This latest S2 App failure and the failure of SONOS from the CEO down to acknowledge their customers in a respectful manner should be recognised honestly for what it is. SCAM is not too strong a word. 

I am not naive or as credulous as the SONOS CEO or Board seem to think their customers are. Nor am I ignorant of how corporations function. It is common for those who are appointed or promoted to senior positions of management to possess and display political skills, sycophantic and psychopathic qualities in equal measure to incompetence while deflecting blame for failure to those in the organisation with real technical expertise and intelligence whose advice is accepted in direct proportion with how they agree with or not with their employer’s decisions however flawed they may be. No one gets promoted by pointing out that the emperor has no clothes.

It would appear that the only course of action open to SONOS customer base present and future is the mounting of a Class Action. It is apparent that the CEO and Board are disingenuous when they claim that their primary reason d’être is to produce quality audio products and deliver exceptional customer experience. Clearly profit is driving this company above anything else to the extent that the business decisions result in a customer outcome equivalent to theft.

I can only recommend to family, friends and the general public to reject SONOS as a home audio solution and choose a manufacturer that demonstrates ethical behaviour in equal measure to technical proficiency.

It is courageous to admit when one is wrong, it is incompetent to pretend otherwise.

I have a variant on this issue.  Sonos lost my music library too, so I've been trying to add it.  I have Windows 10, and my iTunes music library is on a NAS that supports SMB2.  The IP address of the NAS is 192.168.1.9.

If I tell Sonos to look at \\192.168.1.9\Share\iTunes\Music, then it finds and indexes all the music.  But it doesn't import any playlists, because the playlist information isn't in that folder.

If instead I tell Sonos to look at \\192.168.1.9\Share\iTunes - which I'm sure is what it used to do before it lost my library - then that briefly appears to be successful.  But then seconds later I get the error message "... is no longer available. The device where the music files are stored may not be powered on, or the path my have changed."

Any ideas?

Just export the .xml file from iTunes and place that in the library folder structure and see if that resolves your issue. See this link:

https://support.sonos.com/en-us/article/itunes-playlists-missing-from-sonos-library-on-usb-drive

Thanks Ken.  Yes, I can probably do that as a quick fix, but I’ll have to redo it every time the playlists change (I use dynamic playlists, so they change often).  A more robust solution should be possible.

I don’t use iTunes personally, or the .xml file format. I just manually create my own .m3u playlists instead, from time to time, with no ‘directive extensions’.

Using the basic .m3u format, with straightforward UNC paths direct to each of the chosen local music library tracks, entered as a single ‘one-line’ entry, I am able to get a 25,000+ track playlist to load to a Sonos player queue in a matter of a few seconds, well within the 15 second timeout period.

The iTunes playlists from the .xml file always seemed slow to load for me and not compatible with some other Apps/Players.

I think exporting the .xml file to the library folder structure and re-indexing every so often though, is probably the simplest method, if you change playlists often, or add new ones regularly.

So now here is a new twist… I still cannot add my entire music library on my NAS drive to Sonos using the Sonos desktop application for Windows. However, I discovered that I CAN add individual folders below the top level folder of my library. Sonos sees those folders and will play the files in them. For some reason, the application is not seeing the music files in the subfolders below the root folder of my library unless those folders are directly selected. This is something but it is not very practical to add each folder separately as there are a lot of folders in my library. And if the root folder is not being picked up, my iTunes playlists are also not being found by Sonos. At least I know Sonos is able to access my NAS.