Answered

Still can’t “Group” two rooms (for alarm-setting purposes)

  • 11 May 2022
  • 5 replies
  • 1040 views

Had to start a new topic because the “best answer” fails to address the question and the topic has been closed for further comment. (Side note: how does a “best answer” literally start with “I do not understand what you are saying”?) 

Anyway, I’m trying to set alarms to play music in two rooms at a specific, recurring time.

1. When creating an alarm, the Rooms menu allows individual rooms to be selected, and there is also an option to “Include Grouped Rooms”.

2. I can toggle “Include Grouped Rooms” but nothing new appears.

3. I then go to system settings, where “Groups” is greyed out, and it says “This feature is available on systems with three or more rooms.”

4. I have two speakers, which are in separate rooms, and which I commonly group and un-group, depending on who is in each room, so leaving them grouped at all times is not a viable solution, and adding a manual routine to my evening (remembering to open the Sonos app to group my speakers before bed) is an obnoxious and likely unsustainable solution.

To summarize, I think the aforementioned “best answer” confuses “Groups” with grouping. It seems that I need to establish a “Group” to set an alarm to play on more than one speaker, but the feature is not available when you have fewer than three speakers.  

plz fix or tell me what I’m missing before closing this topic.  

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Best answer by John B 11 May 2022, 15:32

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5 replies

Userlevel 7
Badge +20

If I’m understanding your issue, you want your two Sonos Rooms to be grouped together when the alarm is triggered based upon the grouping at the time that the alarm was set.  Is this correct?

Set an alarm on Sonos | Sonos

This article states:

If you check Include grouped rooms, the alarm will play in the rooms that are grouped together at the time the alarm goes off. It does not play in the rooms that were grouped when the alarm was originally added to the Sonos system.

I have more than three Sonos Rooms so can’t test that part of your issue.

@Bbab . You are confusing two things.  No user can group two rooms for the purposes of alarms only. This is true for systems with any number of rooms.

'User defined groups ' are really just shortcuts in selecting speakers when grouping 'on the fly'. You just don't need this when you only have two speakers.  But if you had it, it wouldn't help you at all with alarms.

Userlevel 5
Badge +15

This has been an issue that I have been facing as well. I want to have the same music playing from 6:00-7:00 while we get ready for work in my bedroom, the bathroom and the kitchen. However, right now their is no way to do so. What I have found as your best bet is to create 2 alarms at the same time, 1 for each room. It also gives you some flexibility to adjust start/finish times etc. For example, after a while I realized the bathroom was only needed from 6:00-6:30 and my bedroom I wanted to start at 6:30 so my spouse could sleep an extra 30. Not ideal, but it works. One caveat is that sometimes the “rooms” are out of sync so even though I am listening to the same station because of buffering etc. it is off a little bit.  I really would love to have some more sophistication to the management of this. One other thought, check out the app store as there are several options for creating shortcuts however the app is extra.

If anyone here perhaps uses iOS as their Sonos controller device, then just to quickly mention that the ‘Soro’ 3rd party shortcuts App will happily group Sonos rooms for you and start the chosen Alarm/Music at whatever time of day you schedule the shortcut. You just need to leave your iOS device connected to the LAN so it can trigger these things vis the Sonos API.

I’m not in anyway associated to the App or it’s developer, other than I use it myself for some tasks…

An example alarm (screenshot) from the iOS Shortcuts plugin is attached - its mostly just a ‘drag ‘n’ drop’ exercise and simple interface (iOS shortcuts plugin) to create these type of actions.

@Bbab . You are confusing two things.  No user can group two rooms for the purposes of alarms only. This is true for systems with any number of rooms.

'User defined groups ' are really just shortcuts in selecting speakers when grouping 'on the fly'. You just don't need this when you only have two speakers.  But if you had it, it wouldn't help you at all with alarms.

Thank you John B, not the answer I was hoping for, but that clears it up perfectly. Thanks again!