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Apple Silicon Support

  • 22 December 2020
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When will the Sonos controller for MacOS be updated to run natively on Apple Silicon?

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Best answer by Airgetlam 22 December 2020, 19:11

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Sonos doesn’t release timelines for software development. 

Are you running in to speed issues on your controller?

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I’m merely looking for confirmation that it’s in the works. The controller is definitely slower than usual under Rosetta and can be unstable at times.

As I indicated, Sonos doesn’t release that type of information in advance. You’ll know probably if you’re in their beta group, or find out like the rest of us when they release it publicly.

I wouldn’t expect it anytime soon, though, there wouldn’t be a significant benefit involved, since the controller is essentially only a display layer to the actual process running on the speakers. There is no significant computational effort being expended by the controller.

And, for that matter, Sonos isn’t expending much energy on desktop controllers at this point, having stripped most of the set up functionality out in favor of mobile controllers. 

I’m  sure your request will be added to a backlog list somewhere, but I suspect it won’t rise to the top anytime soon. 

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I appreciate your response. It dawned on me this morning that I can install the iPad app and try that. I recall reading somewhere that most iPad apps run quite well on the new Macs. I will install it today and update this thread with the results.

I’d be interested. I’ve not yet picked up an M1 device, but it is in my future. 

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Unfortunately the iPad app is not available on M1 Macs. I will be emailing Sonos urging them to support M1 Macs sooner rather than later. 

I highly recommend the new M1 Macs, I’ve had an M1 MacBook Air for a few days now and it runs miles around my 2019 Intel MacBook Pro.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

 

-Brandon

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I got the M1 Mac Mini to replace an i7 Mini Server.

Daily use the M1 is faster but when doing CPU intensive operations and writing data to the SSD it’s bloody fast.

Converting a hi res FLAC track to Apple lossless, including writing the tracks to SSD takes about a second. I can run 10 conversions simultaneously and the Mini is still fully responsive, runs cool and no sign of the fan kicking in.

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Sonos on my M1 MacMini with BigSur refuses to index my library on an external USB-C SSD. It says it does it, but when I click on library, there aren’t any entries. This behavior started after the setup was moved to the M1 MacMini. Puzzling. 

Since that work occurs at the speaker’s computer level, it is puzzling. Perhaps the command is not making it from the controller to the speaker?

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Since that work occurs at the speaker’s computer level, it is puzzling. Perhaps the command is not making it from the controller to the speaker?

Possibly, but more likely some config issue with the sonoslibraryservice in back-compat mode failing when accessing the local library.

You’d know more about it than I, for sure. I’d be suspect about running any network reliant iOS app in a Mac environment. Just too much potential for network communication issues in a ‘compat’ mode. 

I’ve seen similar networking issues in game development when running mobile ‘compat’ applications on desktops.

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Unfortunately the iPad app is not available on M1 Macs. I will be emailing Sonos urging them to support M1 Macs sooner rather than later. 

I highly recommend the new M1 Macs, I’ve had an M1 MacBook Air for a few days now and it runs miles around my 2019 Intel MacBook Pro.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

 

-Brandon

you can use iMazing to download, then export and side load the iOS app, it works flawlessly

I’m merely looking for confirmation that it’s in the works. The controller is definitely slower than usual under Rosetta and can be unstable at times.

Experiencing the same issue. The app on M1 is less stable than a USB cam under windows 95 on a packard bell

 

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Unfortunately the iPad app is not available on M1 Macs. I will be emailing Sonos urging them to support M1 Macs sooner rather than later. 

I highly recommend the new M1 Macs, I’ve had an M1 MacBook Air for a few days now and it runs miles around my 2019 Intel MacBook Pro.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

 

-Brandon

you can use iMazing to download, then export and side load the iOS app, it works flawlessly

Great idea! I have iMazing so I’m going to try it. Thank you!!

Sonos on my M1 MacMini with BigSur refuses to index my library on an external USB-C SSD. It says it does it, but when I click on library, there aren’t any entries. This behavior started after the setup was moved to the M1 MacMini. Puzzling. 

 

I have this exact same problem. Were you able to solve it? 

“Sonos isn’t expending much energy on desktop controllers”… They don’t need to put much energy into it, they just need to recompile with the latest XCode version (13), that’s it.

Do they really want us to hack the iPad app and use that one??!!

I know, the old app runs with Rosetta2, but you don’t want that. It’s not like some wrote here, Intel/AMD chips… they have compatible instruction sets, Rosetta2 is an Intel emulator written in ARM.

So yes Sonos, please release an update.

Sonos doesn’t really care about (a) Mac users or (b) people who see no gain in the whole S2 shift, so I wouldn’t expect movement here.

I think my path forward now is probably to just try to cut my losses and sell my S1 gear on /r/sonos or something, because honestly the pure-play Apple approach is easier, cheaper, and sounds just as good. I’ve gone from being a big Sonos booster to actively discouraging my friends from wading in; Sonos no longer offers anything resembling a best-of-breed or even particularly high-end approach.

Put that way, Sonos doesn’t really care about Windows users, either, since pretty much all development has been taken away from all desktop clients, not just Mac users. You can no longer use a desktop client to do most of the “setup” features, either, although they still work fine for playing music. In fact, as I sit here, the Mac client is telling me I’m listening to music right now. 

The removal of features from the desktop clients preceded the split between S1 and S2, so you’d see similar issues on either side. I happen to be running S2. 

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I don’t know if posting will up vote this, but I refuse to install Rosetta on my M1 Macs as the thing is a beauty without it and battery life of a titan.   But now I can’t control my sonos which is a bummer. 

I can run the current software on my M1 MacBook Air without any issue. Not sure why you’d need Rosetta. 

I would love to be able to use the iPad app on my M1 Mac since the macOS app’s GUI is not good.

Lately Sonos app on apple silicon just freezes up, uses excessive CPU and is unresponsive always requires a Force Quit. Congrats on being my first Rosetta2 crasher 😀.  

Would be nice if they either release an apple silicon native app (New iPads are all going to have the M series CPU now...) or fix whatever it is that has caused Rosetta to perform so poorly over the last couple of released updates to the desktop app. 
 

I would also like an Apple Silicon version of the app.

Apple Silicon has been available in production for been over two years, it is simply a lack of focus now. 

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Apple Silicon has been available in production for been over two years, it is simply a lack of focus now. 

64-bit Windows has been available for over a decade, but there is still no 64-bit Sonos app for it, despite almost no-one running 32-bit Windows these days. Windows on ARM has existed for longer than “Apple Silicon”, still no version for that either.

Why is there no version for 64-bit or ARM Windows? Well #1 because the desktop controllers are in life-support maintenance mode only, and #2 because the emulation layers on all these platforms work well enough. Apple is no different in this regard.

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