Retired Sonos Staff

Now Available, the New Sonos App

Introducing Navigation with Tabs:

The Sonos app now has five tabs visible at the bottom when not in the full playing screen. The tabs are My Sonos, Browse, Rooms, Search, and More. See here:

Now your most used options are available with just one click, and Now Playing is always just one tap away.

My Sonos
We’ve consolidated all your personally curated Sonos Playlists, music service playlists, and Sonos Favorites into one, easy to use page on the Sonos app. You can edit fields to move around the order, or delete them entirely. You can now have up to 40 favorites total, up from 32.

Browse
Browsing your music is even easier as it no longer hides your other options. You can browse and move to different rooms all while keeping your place in the browsing menu. There’s also a dock on the bottom of the app that gives you easy access to the navigation tabs. You can swipe it up to reveal it at any time, then back down. We’ve separated browsing your music and the menu for Settings, so it’s even easier to find what you’re looking for.

Rooms
The menu starts highlighted on the active room, featured right on the app so that it’s even easier to see what’s playing in each room. There’s now an icon on that screen to show you where the music is coming from too. That includes if it was started by Alexa. The active room has a Group button to have it add others to the party.

Search
It hasn’t changed, just moved to an easy to find spot.

More...
All the settings and options are in here. You can add services, make alarms, get some help, and access all your settings. We think this will make it a lot easier to find what you’re looking for. And speaking of settings…

Explicit Language Filtering

Within Settings > Parental Controls, you can set a system-wide setting to filter songs with explicit content. Right now, this is working for Apple Music, and we’re hoping to add it for more services soon. Once the setting is on, Apple Music songs with the explicit tag will no longer play on your system.

Long Press to Group

Making it even easier to play music. With 8.0, you can press and hold the Play/Pause button (or mute on older players) to have your player join the most recently active player as a group. First, you have to start playing music on a player, (it can be from an alarm or any other source), and then just hold the button for a few seconds on another player. That second player will join the first one’s group and start playing the same music in sync.

There's another function of the long press, and that's being able to move recently stopped music to another room. First, stop playing music in any of your rooms. Then, press and hold the play/pause on another player for a few seconds. (Make sure that you don't start playing music anywhere else.) The queue or source will move to the unit you held the button for and start playing. The players won't group together and any existing queue will get whiped out in place of the new one.

iOS 11 and Android O Support

Lastly, version 8.0 has support for the latest operating systems from Android and iOS. This includes iOS 11 support for Trueplay on Sonos. Trueplay isn’t available on Android at this time.

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Show previous replies

A

amun

... or to keep repeating what others have already said, time and time again, in the various threads on the forum. .

And if people don't say it, and keep repeating it, then we know from past experience that Sonos will totally ignore it.

...The software has been released as a 'public beta' and that usually means the company will be listening to the views of the public, before finalising things.

And therein lies the problem - you do not release 'beta' software into a live environment - if you do, then you allow regression. It really isn't rocket science.

I think many here should just wait and judge things by the final end product and not keep attacking the same points (over and over again) on what is 'clearly' still very much 'a piece of work in progress'.

If it's in a live environment then it is the finished software - and I can understand people's frustration in not knowing how long they'll have to live with this. It doesn't affect me personally - I now so distrust the quality of Sonos software that I will not 'upgrade' unless I absolutely have to - but I can understand why people might feel strongly about it.

...just give Sonos time to look at what people’s general views are and let’s see what they come up with next.

It's rather more usual to put these views as input into the design process, not wait until it's live and then see what people say. That's the cowboy method of software development.

Guy_19

Enthusiast II

Guy_19,

The voice control and ongoing enhancements are in many ways 'free' to existing hardware owners and clearly both Amazon and Sonos will want the public either to buy their hardware, new and old, or subscribe to the available streaming music services they provide.

I think we should not expect absolutely everything here for 'free', especially in the early days of development... I’m sure Amazon would like to see us all subscribe to either their 'Prime', 'Ultimate' or their 'Shared Family' Music services and purchase one, or more, of their echo devices. In the same vein, Sonos will be hoping to encourage customers to buy their hardware, particularly the new Sonos One speaker.

The developers may go onto develop 'complete' voice control for locally stored libraries, but from an earnings/business-growth perspective, I don’t think either Amazon, or Sonos, would decide to put that development work at the top of their priority list. Its all about sales and profit in the end and so I think the voice control of locally stored music is something for them to look at later, me thinks.

I think we should all be very grateful that Sonos have decided to make these 'free' voice-control upgrades available to existing owners of their legacy hardware and have taken us with them on their journey. They could easily have confined the development to the new 'Sonos One' and any future Sonos products in the pipeline, practically forcing us all to buy their new speaker in order to voice control things.

I am grateful for the work and service the two companies have provided already this year and so far it has cost me very little in real terms... so you won’t hear me complaining about me not being able to play my local library when I now have voice-controlled access to Amazons 40 million tracks for a small monthly outlay. My local music is still available anyway via the app and once an album or playlist is started, I can use voice to then control things anyway.

I think it’s been a great first round of 'voice control' development ... and I’m quite sure there is plenty more still to come our way in the next few months and years.

I agree that having the Echo provide some voice control is an unexpected bonus - and a feature I could live without.
My comment about having a prioritised backlog of requirements and deploying change quickly, was more about development of the app. Dark theme being right at the top of my prioritised backlog, swiftly followed by usability that matches v7.4.

7 rooms: One SL Stereo Pair, One SL x 2, Move, Play:5 Gen2 & Port into Arcam AVR with AE floorstanders, Port into Denon microsystem.

Ken_Griffiths

Guy_19,

I really hope you get what you wish for ... we shall have to wait and see what the next update brings.

Amun,

I see no harm in a public beta, now and then, to get wider feedback to help drive the business forward. None of us were truly forced to update, that’s usually the case with many software updates... some folk prefer to wait and see and others (like me) just go for it. It’s each to their own and I quite like the update on iOS, particularly the new 'My Sonos' tab ... the 'Browse' tab is similar to the previous app anyway.

Yes I too want to see smaller icons, less white, and a few other things besides, but the advantages for me still outweigh the disadvantages and I’m happy to patiently wait for the next release, as it was my decision to upgrade to v8 in the first place.

jgatie

And if people don't say it, and keep repeating it, then we know from past experience that Sonos will totally ignore it.

Nonsense. People didn't clamor on for lot of things Sonos has done in the past. Crossfading showed up out of nowhere, as did pointing to a share that is not the root. There are many others.

And therein lies the problem - you do not release 'beta' software into a live environment - if you do, then you allow regression. It really isn't rocket science.

The Sonos app actually is not a beta, the beta is the Sonos skill for Alexa. Also, plenty of betas are released to the public, hence the term "Public Beta".

If it's in a live environment then it is the finished software - and I can understand people's frustration in not knowing how long they'll have to live with this. It doesn't affect me personally - I now so distrust the quality of Sonos software that I will not 'upgrade' unless I absolutely have to - but I can understand why people might feel strongly about it.

As stated, it is finished software, but not for the reasons you list. And in reality, "finished" means nothing, for it could change tomorrow, next week, next month,or next year. Indeed, Sonos listened to the rational posters who calmly made their case for additions and changes to the last app redesign. I imagine they will do the same with this one, if they can sort out the rational posters from the melodrama and faux outrage. Try being part of the former and not the latter and things may get done.

As to not trusting Sonos, if you are willing to live with the fact that eventually your music services will cease to operate and you cannot add new Sonos hardware, who are we to judge? Personally, if I were as disappointed as most of you seem to claim, my stuff would be on e-bay and I would never post here again. I'm not one to expect a company to bend to my wishes, I'd rather dump them for one that meets my needs. "Or the bunny gets it" is not how I roll. :D

It's rather more usual to put these views as input into the design process, not wait until it's live and then see what people say. That's the cowboy method of software development.

If you did not participate in the alpha/beta process, you have no idea who had input into the design process. You only know you were not. Though I will say that by the time the software enters beta, the design elements are pretty set.

J

John B

I wait expectantly for the 'fanboy' accusations, but here goes..

The new app has its flaws (more on that in a minute) but basically it is really simple to use. New things take a bit of getting used to. Most of those who have slammed the new app seem to have based their views on 2 minutes effort. The Sonos bar is key. I want to pick a room? Tap the Rooms button. Then a source? Tap Browse. The one inconvenience is that the bar doesn't appear on the Now Playing screen, but I hope that will change. But I just swipe down and there is the bar (and usually either the Rooms or Browse screen, saving me one of my button presses).

I came in this evening and in less than ten seconds of opening the app had my music library playing in the Living Room. How disastrous is that?

It is logically organised. Instead of a jumble of things on the main menu, Browse contains just sources (wish they had called it Sources), More contains the things I need much less often, like Settings and Setup. Search and Rooms are self evident. 'My Sonos' contains the things I have chosen myself and want to get at quickly. What is so ****** difficult?

Yes, the icons are too big. Yes the Sonos bar should be on EVERY screen. I'd like to see Playlists on the Browse screen and just selected playlists in My Sonos.

But come on guys. Get with it and make a bit of an effort. With a few tweaks this is going to be way better than 7.4. If you want to be left behind, that's your call.

J

J0hn0000

Contributor III

Nope

J

John B

NopeGood to hear that someone doesn't want to be left behind.

J

J0hn0000

Contributor III

Haha hardly
There’s progress and then there’s regress
I’m sure it’ll be fine in a few iterations

J