Loss of SiriusXM functionality for on-demand content

Unfortunately, Sonos isn’t responsible for the content that SiriusXM chooses to provide. Sonos has written the API, but SiriusXM applies it to their own server, and chooses what content to expose to it. 

It does sound like SiriusXM has made changes on their side, and haven’t yet transferred those change to work with the Sonos API yet, although they may not really be aware of the issue. I’d encourage you to engage with their CS, and let them know about your concerns, I’d hope they would address them. The Sonos API hasn’t changed, to my knowledge, otherwise there would be similar reports from many other services. 

I would imagine Sonos’ QA tested/approved the initial implementation, but likely was unaware that SiriusXM was making changes at this point. 

Thanks - my QA comment was mostly targeted at SiriusXM with all the recent changes they’ve made to their apps on various platforms. I don’t know what they were thinking with the UI changes. I’ll try to engage CS at SiriusXM to let them know how Sonos has changed for their content.

I would imagine it’s relatively easy to forget a third party connection to your system, when your focus up is on your own software. And I suspect, in the grand scheme of things, Sonos customers are a relatively small percentage of their customers. 

I know in my past, I’ve needed to deal with several ‘scrapers’ of data my company posted with regards to the games I worked on. If we made necessary changes in order to improve our service, it might break their scraping function, so I would dedicate a certain portion of a coder’s time in order to help them get set back up…but it was a secondary concern, our own systems were the priority. 

Another comment/question I have with this service on Sonos is how it never remembers your position for on-demand content (it always starts back at the beginning). That has always bothered me, but not sure if Sonos has any control of that or if SiriusXM would fully control it?

Alexa does remember your position (almost always), so it’s a better experience from that standpoint. Where Sonos used to shine prior to this week is showing the metadata of song/artist for on-demand content (Alexa could never do that).

So for now anyways the win is with Alexa because she can at least remember the position (if I had to choose though it would be in getting the metadata if Sonos can somehow get that back (albeit with SiriusXM to fix)).

I’ve never checjed the Sonos Music API to see if that data is included….but would think it’s available, as I would expect Audible to use it to restart a book in the same place where you left off. If that is true, then it suggests that SiriusXM isn’t including that data in the stream that they feed to Sonos. Perhaps they did Sonos so many years before doing Alexa, they just haven’t revisited Sonos to add that to their data stream. I’d certainly ask the CS folks at SiriusXM…with little expectation other than them passing the question on to someone who knows. It’s hard, in my experience, to hire CS reps who know every single possible thing. 

[skip to the bottom if you just want the solution]

They did a remote session on my phone.
I demonstrated the problem and they asked me to remove SiriusXM and then add it back to my Sonos.

I then played Deep Tracks and the song/artist info was there!

We switched channels to Nugs.net and the info was missing. 😓

But then, I switched back to Deep Tracks and it was still missing.

And then I noticed something…

In my Recently Played list, I had TWO DIFFERENT DEEP TRACKS STATIONS.  One had a blue background and the other had a white background. 

• The one with the white background said “27 - Deep Tracks and SiriusXM Station” underneath it.
• The one with the blue background said “Deep Tracks and All Channels” underneath it.

The music is the same regardless of which station I played, but the song/artist information appears only when I play the station with the blue background.

[Solution]

1. Try playing the SiriusXM station by going to Browse → SiriusXM → All Channels and finding the channel that way.  I believe this will work.
2. Once you do that, remove the channel from your My Sonos.  My guess is this channel will show up with a white background
3. Go back to the channel using step 1 and then add it back to My Sonos if you want to.
4. When playing from the Recently Played list, avoid using the channels with the white background.  Eventually they should drop off the list.

See if that works...✌

John

That is awesome and super-helpful - thank you! I’m sending you a virtual bro-hug if that’s okay 

Now if only we can figure this out for On-Demand content … still a no go for this to get song/artist info like we used to

Lesson learned in the meantime: Blue is Good 😇, White is Bad 👿

You're welcome. I'm glad I noticed the different versions of the channels.

I wish I'd noticed the issue with the on-demand content while I was on with Sonos support. Maybe I'll call back…

Bro-hug is totally fine 

Peace,

John