Update on the Sonos App from Patrick Spence

Well that contrast is part of what makes the flakiness so maddening and kind of proves the point: the same (or more complex) system works for one person and not for others. Experts here can claim “Those of you having problems aren’t configuring your router properly” or other blame-the-user things like that, and who knows, maybe they’re right (although I doubt it). But we can’t know that, can we, given the seemingly random error message salad that Sonos spews: “Something went wrong. Try again” or “Error 913” or “The song is not encoded correctly” (a particularly annoying error belied by the fact that the song played fine for 3 minutes until 5 seconds ago, and by the way is playing from Sonos Radio, so if it it really were not encoded correctly, YOU PEOPLE misEncoded it, and oh … now it’s playing fine again.) If Sonos were to give useful plain-language error messages such as “Living Room Sonos PLAY:1 has dropped off your wifi network,” or “I see you’re on controller version 14.20; the current version is 80.05.04” then we could diagnose things that might truly be our fault.

That would be ridiculously helpful! Coders must surely have to type in the error messages so why can’t they type the actual issue instead of ‘error 1002’… 

Regarding knowing what’s wrong, on many occasions I’ve tried to give as much info as I can about my functioning setup in the hope that there might be one thing there that some users might think ‘oh, I’ll try setting my mesh to AP mode’ or ‘my router has an MTU of 1492 - I wonder if I should have it on 1500’ - not to be smug but to help offer some relief from the ongoing frustration. My setup works fluidly and without issue so the settings I have across router, mesh, phone and app are clearly congruent with the settings needed for Sonos to work.

But people just cannot be bothered to explore the possibility. They shouldn’t have to, and yes it may well have worked fine before - but it doesn’t work for them now so it feels like spending 30 mins fine tuning settings (I’ve no IT expertise but I can access my router settings) could bring back full Sonos functionality rather than 30 days of shouting at the forum…

Bravo! Superior trolling.

Just FYI to everyone in this post…

If you want your voice to be heard you have to leave your own comments.

Giving a like to someone else’s comment doesn't express the why of your dissatisfaction. To put that in perspective it’s no different than you allowing someone else to vote (on whatever) and you just wait for the results without casting your own vote. The results may not be what you hoped for.

Put another way for you down-home country folks...You can’t win a fishing contest if you don’t bait your hook and put your pole in the water.

As it looks at the time of this writing only 2.61% (162) have responded out of 6188 views.

Before you start...I know those are just raw numbers without any actual data analysis. If someone would like to somehow extrapolate the actual data...then be my guest. 

Thanks. Even the most helpful people need a break every now and again from giving their time selflessly.

Do you not feel a level of guilt selling on your products ?

My conscience would not permit me to sell or even give away something that i do not think lives up to standard.

I guess there is always the defence of diferent users different needs.

Shocking that promised resolutions have been pushed back again.

Upon someone mentioning it i realised not just music library but also playing from mobile is not an option.

As many have suggested they should make 16.2 available until this mess is sorted out.

I managed to download it and have locked it off from updates to keep using this speaker eco system as i intended

Extremely disappointed about the new app. This ‘apology’ is simply too late.

There are customers, who have spend a significant amount on your products. You can't simply say sorry and move on, when these customers cannot use the products they bought.

I must admit that I did not face many issues at the beginning. As a software developer I can relate that bugs occur. But this is another level. Features are suddenly not available anymore, flaky response in the app (system not found etc). But recently I ‘discovered’ several breaking issues when I was trying to help somebody installing his Sonos devices. He can't use his Port, for several months now….

Also, this community forum which seems to be maintained by users gives me the feeling that the company doesn't listen to their customers.

I advise anyone with a personal library having problems with it, to set up a Plex server and add it as service in the Sonos app. You don't have to be particularly tech savvy and there's lots of information out there about how to do it. If you're particular about your tagging like I am, make sure you untick the box that allows Plex to alter it! I set it up after they ditched SMB1 access and it runs flawlessly. I have it running on a Mini-PC and it should be possible set it up on most NAS systems and, obviously, PCs. You can access and playback all of your music (with album artwork!) in the Sonos app and create playlists that won't get lost by Sonos. I finally removed the Sonos access to my library after an update a couple of weeks ago which meant that all tracks from Various Artists albums were listed as individual albums. 

I have all 11 volumes in the Easy Tempo series and all are V/A artist albums. Compare and contrast the search results returned from the Sonos app when searching Easy Tempo in the Sonos search bar on my Android phone which is running the latest app update:

Hello Sonos, Thank you for the update. We appreciate the feedback. Is is possible to post the “fixes” being addressed in each release…..? Again, many thanks.

Fire Spence.