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How to control Sonos playback at a party


Is it possible to stop others from changing Sonos? We are having a huge party soon and last time, Sonos hardly played anything as everyone was changing it via their apps on their phones constantly! I want to be able to control the music played for this event. HELP PLEASE! TIA 🙂
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Best answer by ratty 3 July 2018, 16:05

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17 replies

Change your wifi password so that they can't log onto your wifi. You should be more concerned about the general security issue of handing out your wifi password than handing over control of Sonos. If your router has a Guest network (most do), let them log onto that if you are happy for them to use your wifi for internet access.
Thanks for your answer John B. I've never given anyone my WiFi password so now I'm worried! :S
Somebody did*, otherwise your party-goers wouldn't have had access to the network and to your Sonos system. You'd better grill the other members of the household....

Since the WiFi password is evidently 'out in the wild' you'll need to change it.

*Even without giving out the password, someone could in theory have smuggled in their own access point and plugged it into the network. Now that would be really sinister...
Or maybe you are still using the factory set wireless key printed on your router?
Thanks John B - I did not realise you could personalise it - been looking into this after your first response. Bit of a pain as will need to change loads of devices! It does show it as locked though - the factory set one?!
Not sure what you are saying is locked?? What is make and model of router?
Its the BT Hub and what I mean by that is when I go into my phone I see a padlock icon which means you need a password - or so I thought - to use that network. see attached
I'm not sure that is the point. You need a password to connect to the network, nobody is disputing that. The problem is that clearly several people who have come to your house have found out what that password is. You need to change that password.

This is best done on a computer but an iPad will probably be OK. If you look on your router it will probably have something called the 'admin password' as well as the network key. Can you see that?
http://bt.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/14110
That is most likely the case John B and hence I tried to see how to change it earlier - which I will have to do, but we have so many devices linked to the router, it's a time consuming process to have to change every password on every device.

My original question was can I stop other people from changing the music selection? Does Sonos not have any form of blocking other devices from changing the selection??

Thanks Ratty too - I had looked at that earlier, but as mentioned it's a huge task for our large household.

Thanks
Does Sonos not have any form of blocking other devices from changing the selection??
No. Security is assumed to be at the network level, this being the responsibility of the householder.

Unless you're going to get into the complexity of VLANs (not available with a BT router), alternative options are to use a Guest network (also not available on a home BT hub) or to shove Sonos onto a private secondary subnet, behind another router.
Oh my - that sounds complicated to me! Thank you for the info Ratty - I'll have to confiscate phones then LOL
I'll look into the Guest network and change the password we have currently. Thanks for your help guys.
It's a pain, I know, but you need to change your Wireless key, and then, yes, go round all your wireless networked devices and enter the new wifi password. Once again I say, this is needed primarily because people have been able to look at your router, get the wireless key and get access to your network. Sonos or no Sonos. You just have to bite the bullet now that you are in this situation.

Best practice is to change the wifi password after installing the router and keep it private, but I appreciate that many people are unaware of that.
Changing the password on your router is pretty simple given the instructions posted by @ratty. I suspect you will need to type into a browser address bar (where you would put a website name) the following:

192.168.1.254

Then if you look for wireless settings and click to edit them, it will ask you for that admin password from the router. The admin password allows you to get into your router and change its settings, one of which is the network password (key)!
Yes, I've looked into that as it's a horrid assembly of numbers and letters so something a bit more down to earth would be beneficial. I'm just searching to see what I need to do to set up this Guest network . . . . as if I've not got enough to do! Thanks John B
BT hubs don't have a Guest network. The nearest they get is the 'BTWiFi'/'BTWiFi-with-FON' which is open to anyone with a BT broadband account.
OK thanks Ratty.