Question

Rubbish new update, what do others think ?

  • 10 September 2016
  • 82 replies
  • 4347 views

Userlevel 2
Badge
Hi there, I'm not really one to complain because my sonos equipment is the best I've ever brought. But I must say. I've just done the new update and I think it's a load of rubbish! I don't want my playlist clearing when I want to play another, I'd like to clear it myself thank you please! What do others think? Please take this on board, thank you .

This topic has been closed for further comments. You can use the search bar to find a similar topic, or create a new one by clicking Create Topic at the top of the page.

82 replies

Userlevel 1
The new playlist behavior is horrible! Unless I am missing something it's a hugh step backward in user friendliness. Please, let me turn this off!
Userlevel 3
Badge +1
I think it is horrible. It is oriented toward the instant play to the point that creating playlists is a PAIN. And if you err before you save it, you will lose it all. And you can ERR by not putting your finger exactly where it wants it, because the sensitivity is not how I would have liked it and CLEAR your playlist. What genius there thought that up? Really?? Coupled with the edge alphabet nearly encroaching on the main screen - stinks. Worst Sonos experience in 3 years. 😞
Userlevel 3
Badge +2
Tap to Play

"Tap a song on your phone or tablet, it starts instantly. No need to select Play Now or Play Next. Controlling your Sonos from a computer? Double click to play."......

Then it clears the que and not only puts in the song you selected but also every other song in the list. if you want to play just that 1 song, then you have to press the dots and select play now etc. you should call it tap to destroy playlist or just tap tap tap. this new "feature" is a huge step backward for Sonos. You have taken one of the most intuitive apps and created more steps to play a song, and I now spend even more time on the phone explaining to my clients how to add songs to the que without destroying their playlist! One of the best things about Sonos was the fact that even the most technically challenged among us could easily and quickly learn how to use it with little or no instruction, until now.

in the past few days I have now received 6 calls from clients and they all start with the same sentence, " I just did the Sonos update and now my playlists keep getting replaced every time i select a song....."

This update did add some great features, the play album, play all, shuffle all options are great! But if you are going to have a feature called tap to play, it should be just that. You search, you find, you tap, it plays! It simply adds the song (and ONLY that song) to the que and begins to play. Simple and intuitive as Sonos has always been!!!!
Userlevel 3
Badge +1
I was a software developer myself for over 20 years in UNIX and Windows amongst other theatres. Everything was meant to be intuitive to users, and bombproof. I was a UI specialist. This "upgrade" (which I don't seem to be able to roll back) is none of that. The more I try to use it, the more I hate it. The steps to try to add songs to a playlist have increased, and the only way I think I could confidently build a playlist is with a PC - not a smartphone. I have more room to work and less chance to err.

Select artist. Select album. Be sure you select the TOP HALF of the icon if you are doing playlist. Select song... but select the "..." if you are working on a playlist or you may get the dreaded dialogue warning you that if your finger drifts a couple of millimeters to the left you will lose any changes to the playlist you have been constructing. You will NOT get another warning - all gone. Harkens back to 1986 MS-DOS word processor with no autosave feature for changes. Even MS-DOS had "Delete xxx? Are you sure?" You get the thinnest warning of that here and the greatest potential of missing the mark with your smartphone finger touch I have ever observed. It will cut you no slack.

I won't be building/modifying any playlists on a phone until this is rectified.
Userlevel 1
The playlist is a disaster! Please give users a choice how the playlist should behave.
Sonos is still the best, but the update does not work for me.
Please fix it!!!
Userlevel 3
Badge +1
All - terribly sorry, but if this is Sonos today, I am out. 3 Play 1's, 2 Connects and a Boost - modest, but over 5000 tunes in the library. I can't work with it as it is. It just blows my mind. I can't build a playlist anymore without excruciating efforts. Sonos - you have stabbed your faithful in the back with your "update". Was all this to get new business? Sounds like marketing got the upper hand of R&D.
I am holding off from upgrading as the feedback is not good for those of us that love the non-destructive queue function.

I agree with Johnkfitz and if Sonos want to implement one tap play then it should be just that - play it right there in the queue. It should not destroy the queue and therefore no warning message would be required.

I dont really play full albums so the fact that it will start playing songs that I have not selected is bizzare and an awful feature. It would have been better if Sonos made this one of the options, e.g Play Album From Here. Give us the choice and don't force us to put music into the queue that we have not selected.

I hope Sonos see sense but I fear that the queue feature that made Sonos stand out from the rest of the crowd is going to be pushed aside for an iTunes/Spotify experience.
Userlevel 4
Badge
Sonos what the actual hell have you done? You've totally ruined the control app with this nonsense. Did you even test this pathetic backward step before destroying the user experience for your customers?

Every time you click on a song to play it, it deletes your entire queue (that I did want and spent ages building full of my favourite tracks) and replacing it with the entire album or playlist (which I don't want!). There was the Play All function for occasions when you wanted to add a whole album to your queue. Wanting to play one song does not equate to wanting to play the whole album and delete every bloody song from your queue without warning.

This is worse than annoying. It is unfit for purpose and in this one move, you have annihilated all the enjoyment from your products. I've been using Sonos for several years, I have loved it. I've spent over a grand on your kit, and encouraged many friends to join the Sonos community because your products worked, were intuitive and flexible. I currently regret that. No one in their right mind would want to buy a product that behaves like this current shower of sh@t.

THERE WAS NOTHING WRONG WITH HOW IT WAS. PLEASE ALLOW ME TO PUT IT BACK IMMEDIATELY.

You've taken the best feature of Sonos, which worked perfectly, thing which made me invest a lot of money in several Sonos units for around my home and utterly ruined it. It is currently unusable.

If you want to avoid this experience destroying farce people, do not whatever you do, install the upgrade to version 6.4. Stick with 6.3.2 where everything worked as it should.

PLEASE CAN SOMEONE FROM SONOS REPLY TO THIS URGENTLY AND HELP ME PUT THIS BACK TO HOW IT USED TO BE WHEN IT WORKED AND RESTORE THE FUNCTIONALITY THAT I PAID FOR...
Userlevel 4
Badge
Not only is the new update for "play now" functionality a step back, but it's inconsistent. Losing the queue history and overwriting every time you start playing is a change we can probably deal with, but the actual behaviour when you play an album is:
1. On iOS, overwrite entire queue with new album
2. On Windows desktop, insert album into queue (typically at position 2) so your queue looks like "last album played track one, new album added, last album played tracks 2-9"
3. On old Sonos CR200 controller, add new album to end of queue (as before)

Oh, and there's the scary error messages... did anyone actually design or test this?

The queue "just worked" and was great. If you're going to de-emphasise or outright kill it, at least make up your mind, Sonos.
Queue Destruction! Don't update your Sonos! Select a track and get ready for the entire artist catalog of 200 songs to kill your meticulously built queue. Hopefully the skilled employees of Sonos are listening- pun intended!!! Help!!!!
User interface design is best judged by usage, not the quality and awareness of its documentation.

Imagine a car maker that decided to make the steering wheel operate in the opposite way. Clockwise turns left, anti-clockwise to the right. This change is clearly documented and advertised. All purchasers get suitable training. This is still not a good UI decision because it is not intuitive, it changes previous convention, and if you let anyone else use the car they are likely not trained and don't have the time or inclination to RTFM.
Userlevel 3
Badge +1
I think they should have preserved the existing UI and added a mode switch to enter a parallel UI that performs instant "Play Now" gratification. Wouldn't have been that difficult and wouldn't have needed to affect any playlist.
Userlevel 5
Badge +10
Not only is the new update for "play now" functionality a step back, but it's inconsistent. Losing the queue history and overwriting every time you start playing is a change we can probably deal with, but the actual behaviour when you play an album is:
1. On iOS, overwrite entire queue with new album
2. On Windows desktop, insert album into queue (typically at position 2) so your queue looks like "last album played track one, new album added, last album played tracks 2-9"
3. On old Sonos CR200 controller, add new album to end of queue (as before)

Oh, and there's the scary error messages... did anyone actually design or test this?

The queue "just worked" and was great. If you're going to de-emphasise or outright kill it, at least make up your mind, Sonos.
Userlevel 5
Badge +10
Chucked a few albums onto the Sonos today. I understand why "play now" might now default to "insert into queue" when you're playing music (use case: "play this song then go back to what you were playing"), but the desktop app's implementation for playing when the music is stopped is weird - it inserts into queue, not at the start (somewhat logical) or end (previous behaviour), plays what you asked it to, then continues to play something you were listening to minutes/hours/days ago. And given the insert position of likely track 2 of a playlist/album... I can't replicate this on the iPad, because the "play all" button only seems to do a queue-replace-and-play-now. So for a system where a key selling point is "it just works on all your devices", this kind of inconsistency over something as simple as "playing music" does not bode well...
Nonsense. Designing a user interface and telling people how to use it does not absolve your work from subjective criticism. You can like it, I can hate it, neither of us is wrong, nor is one of us ignoring the f'n manual. Quit trying to negate legitimate, subjective criticism. Even I didn't do that with the 5.0 complainers. I told them that there is no chance of going backwards and they should instead concentrate on making 5.0 better. But I never told them their dislike isn't warranted or RTFM.
Userlevel 7
Badge +15
Perfect Peter Mc, just perfect.
Some desperately need to disagree though.
Userlevel 3
The multi room feature now sucks, you have to dig down the bottom to get it and every time i want to switch rooms, to have different music playing in each it seems to move the music with me, wich is NOT what i want to do.

Give us back V7 - seriously, don't fix something that isn't broken.

For everyone out there - DO NOT UPGRADE if you can avoid it.
Userlevel 2
Badge +2
There are also some bugs as well. Getting a lot of queue 1002 errors when trying to use the new functionality.
Userlevel 3
Badge +1
The silly thing about it all is that in OOP the app would not have grown much in size to provide for both pathways. If they had a proper perspective, they could have had it all for both sorts of potential clients. Apparently, they were lacking somewhere. My reviews forward are negative, since Sonos took a useful product I had purchased at a substantial cost in good faith and diminished the value of the product to me in a substantial way.
Userlevel 5
Badge +7
Did you even test this pathetic backward step before destroying the user experience for your customers?

.


User695950 you can be assured that this update was tested and previewed in Beta testing. I participated in it myself and when I experienced it I communicated my strong feelings against this update through the official Beta channels. I had communicated that for the 1st time a Sonos change had seemed completely unintuitive and has actually materially deteriorated my user experience.

There has been a thread among community users that discuss it at length. What you would find there are many for and many against. But my perspective is that the ones who like it were not necessarily grossly unhappy with the previous queuing concept. However, those against it are strongly against and also for the 1st time I am actually seeing a few making dire comments about how it ultimately altered their feeling for the product and that they will have trouble recommending. I am certainly not in that space. I still think the products are great and I can work around it. But I remain unhappy with the change. I think for myself and many others the previous system worked perfectly. There are a few changes that allow quicker actions eg play all and shuffle- I like those.

See the thread discussing the Beta below.

https://en.community.sonos.com/announcements-228985/sonos-version-64-now-public-beta-6738453
Sonos - this is a really awful and unpopular update. Please un-screw this for your many loyal subscribers.
All change has a benefit and a cost. In an ideal world, if analysis reveals the benefit outweighs the cost, change happens. Better still, if the benefit can also be SEEN to outweigh the cost, those affected by the change are generally happy. In the real world, the actual and perceived benefits are not always there. Organizational change comes to mind here.

In the present case, I'm sure Sonos has some very good reasons for making the changes they have. But I'm not convinced that the benefits outweigh the cost here. They gain similarity to other software, and a reduced number of taps under certain circumstances. That's about it. They lose by increasing the complexity for everyday tasks, and they lose the intuitive ease of use of their software. They also lose the support of some users, and these are generally the vocal users who are prepared to post here, and prepared to extol the joys of Sonos to others.

Do you remember the outcry when Sonos went from version 5 to version 6? It was pretty similar to this. Eventually Sonos got the message and improved the software to the point where we all want to go back to 6.3. I'm hopeful the same will happen here, and that the software will evolve so that we are substantially happy with it, and complain bitterly when version 7 appears :)

Cheers, Peter.
Userlevel 5
Badge +7
Jeeez. I have been here and with my Sonos equipment for quite some time now. Every new version: same story! Dozens of people pathetically demanding the old UI because of x or y.

If you do not like change, do not update. Simple as that. Apart from that, you can do everything with this version (if not more) what you could do with the old one. Maybe just a little bit differently. Since the redesign, Sonos certainly has put lots of thought in making the app better and better, easier and faster to handle your music.

If your hearts really so much depend on a certain Sonos playlist, I would recommend to a) save it and b) get a life.

Sorry if this seems rude, but if Sonos would listen to threads like this, we all would still use the interface from years ago.:P


This is a generalized view that is true. But generalizations are not always appropriate. Many persons who are here complaining about this update have generally accepted most if not all the previous ones. I have myself found persons to be not accepting of change. One time I felt that way is with the update that came with universal search. I couldn't understand why some were so bothered by it.

With this one, while in Beta - a legitimate way of collecting feedback - many of these issues were raised. Many had expressed concern about the new queue management. My feeling of those who shared views on this community more persons had issues with it than liked it. I will tell you I had a very bad reaction to it. There is that concept of intuitiveness. Many find this approach unintuitive.

Finally, it's ok to like the new update but it's not ok to come on this forum and tell people to "get a life".
Userlevel 5
Badge +11
Did you lose your queues? Of course not. Are you complaining that you did? Of course not.
It's now simply different. Just as the original interface was different.
There were things in the old i never used as there will be things in the new that I shall not use. I shall adapt to the new and not complain about what was and now isn't. IOS10 users will be out in force about the silly, stupid and ignorant changes Apple have made because it means they will have to learn a new way of doing things.

I too was happy with the defaults. It's now changed to soemthing else. So what. That's my opinion.
My beef is with those who couldn't be bothered to RTFM and blame Sonos for their inaction.
But we never had those problems before and we never gave a primer on how to not delete the queue out to party goers after they hang up their coats. Should we really be happy with a UI that is so unintuitive that people delete queues the first time they use it?

Am I not allowed to dislike the new interface as much as you like it? Should one not be able to politely and honestly state their displeasure? This is a purely subjective matter. Some will like it, others won't. Unlike the naysayers from the change to 5.0, I am not asking to be rolled back, I'm not asking for the absurd like having Sonos maintain two apps in the future, I'm not even asking for a user level switch between the two. I'm asking that Sonos consider that some of us like the communal juke-box UI as opposed to the one-user with headphones UI, and that incorporating some of the ideas in the beta thread would go a long way towards alleviating the gap between the two. I get it: You like it, we don't. That's OK, as long as we aren't making absurd requests, our opinion should be heard.

And by the way, there was something in the old that originally was not in the new: A single track "Play Now" function. They didn't think it necessary because the new way was better .You know who got it added back? The people who didn't like the new way of doing things. All we ask is Sonos keep an open mind about other concerns.