This is almost exactly me. I spent my career working in software development and this is not “normal”, it’s not “OK” and it needs propertly fixing. There is no way that a sofware release with that many basic problems could get through testing. So the decision to release it wasn’t a software release issue.

My guess it was that or delay the headphones. If so, the entire brand has been tanked for one product. That’s a tens of millions of value mistake.

Fifty bucks off Sonos Ace headphones on the company site  - bet the suckers who bought them when they were launched are really pleased they supported the company by getting behind a new product.  They haven’t even been out much more than two months yet.  This company seems intent on alienating its most loyal customer base - honestly staggering.  

Sony, Bose and Apple all discounted their flagship headphones pretty early. Sony, Bose within a few months and Apple IIRC was 6 months. So not unusual. Best to wait for deeper discount at Black Friday IMO if for some weird reason you want them. Though there’s no way I’m buying these over any of the competitors. 

Your knowledge of the headphone market humbles me.   

Thank you for your patience?  Sonos has used my patience up long ago.  Spence is an idiot!

Sorry Spence buddy, too late for me.  It's sad that it's come to this, but I won't be spending any more on Sonos - after more than a decade, I have no faith in Sonos as a company any more.  A change in management is required IMHO.

Hi All.

I have just had to prune multiple posts from this thread due to unacceptable behaviour. 

To be clear, any post who’s purpose it is to make a visitor to this site feel unwelcome breaks our Community Guidelines, and any authors of such posts will receive warnings and will eventually be permanently banned from the site.

I therefore ask you all to please try to be cordial to each other. Thank you.

Thank you. It was getting quite upsetting / frustrating with the gaslighting from Rhonny that somehow the issues many of us are facing with e.g. library and alarms were our fault, and not that of Sonos.

Hi @jun_man 

To be clear, it was not Rhonny who was in breach of the Community Guidelines - it was everyone who was talking to him.

I don’t think he was trying to blame you at all - he was simply trying to say that not everyone is affected by certain issues and that finding out why may be key to solving the issues any particular person may be having. For example, Music Library functionality was never removed - I have been able to listen to ML on my own system since day one of the new app coming out, but there were certainly people who did have issues with it, and only those people were in a position to do anything about that - there’s not going to be a future update that restores ML functionality, as it was never removed.

Which is not to say that we (Sonos) don’t have our own work to do to fix many things going wrong with the app - and that is what we are doing.

Tensions are high at the moment, but picking on someone who had nothing to do with the new app coming out is unacceptable.

Except… it was removed. With the update to the 80.x versrion I lost access to my local library (airsonic API) and wanted to use the Local Library as a plan B feature and… it was gone, only to be back a few months later.

You updated, expecting the software to be “the same” as marketed ? Well, sucks to be you that function is gone and you can’t downgrade anymore.

This is simply making a bad situation worse.

If the Music Library functionality was never removed, why did it stop working for me and many others when a new update was installed? It was then not possible to re-enable access to the library, a situation which continues for me today.

And why is your CEO confirming that in the release plans is “Implementing Music Library configuration, browse, search, and play”. Are you suggesting he’s not telling the truth?

Hi @garfieldairlines 

SMBv1 support was removed - not Music Library functionality in general. As was implied, this affected some users and not others. Those who were affected will need to adjust how their Sonos system connects to their Music Library, as there will be no “fix” forthcoming for deliberately removed protocol support. Which is exactly the point that was trying to be made in this thread. Our updated Add your music library to Sonos help page has full instructions.

This change had nothing to do with the new app - it was made at the level of the speaker’s firmware. I’ll admit that the timing was atrocious, however. There were also some users who would see the Music Library object on the Home Screen disappear. That was due to the new app, and it was not something that users could address - that fell on us to address. 

AirSonic is not supported by Sonos, so I can’t help you in that respect.

There are many alternatives to using Music Library - YouTube Music, iBroadcast.com, Apple Music and others allow you to upload your music collection to the cloud, and stream to Sonos. Plex is also an option. But, anyone who has equipment not limited to SMBv1 only should be able to use Music Library on their Sonos systems without issue.

in addition to our help pages, there are several threads on this topic. These are the two most useful:

I hope this helps.

Hi @j-pkeates 

If you lost access to your ML, then it was likely connecting with either SMBv1, or HTTP. Neither are now supported, but SMBv2 and SMBv3 are. Please see my above post for instructions on how to rectify this.

Sonos systems never lost ML functionality, but the new Sonos app did not initially include the ability to configure ML. It does now.

I am a sysadmin (even worked as a netadmin!), I know about SMB versions and my NAS had SMB1 turned off since… forever.

My complain is that adding a new Local library was fully gone for months in the settings, there was no way to do that, it was fixed later but it was kind of disappointing (no cover art). This experience is subpar for a hefty price…

And I don’t want to rent online cloud services, I took pride in building my own library at home, you say Airsonic isn’t supported but it was (unofficially, granted) and I was happy. It’s just that it doesn’t fit in your technical stack of cloud-first based services since the launch of the 80.X app. I bought sonos devices making some due diligence in being assured that everything can work locally at home. You just swept in and profoundly changed the system.

It was only thank to the linkedin post of Andy Pennell h1] that I fully understood what happened to my system and why it doesn’t work anymore like I wanted it to. He did a better job at explaining the technical implications of your new update than the Sonos support…

I am honestly disappointed that Sonos marketed it as a “App update”, and at no time told us that the entire backend stack was changed. I feel gaslighted.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-happened-sonos-app-technical-analysis-andy-pennell-wigwc

My NAS drive has, and always has had SMB2 enabled (as well as SMB1). I don’t know which the Sonos system was using, but it lost connection when I installed a software update. And then I couldn’t set it up again.

Today Sonos (MacOS app) can locate the server, prompt for a user name and password, say it’s added and starts indexing and then immediately says the path’s not available and removes the share. That happens if I use the IP address or the device name.

Throughout I can see the NAS device and files from other devices. Other media players work fine.

I’ve copied my music library to a locally connected hard drive, and that doesn’t work either.

Hi @garfieldairlines 

There were ways to do it, just not with the new app. The desktop app for Windows or Mac could have done it, for example.

Cover art will be coming back with a future update, but we’d rather work on addressing the issues that are affecting people in more disruptive ways first.

Officially unsupported is unsupported. What you found was something that happened to work. It doesn’t work now, and that’s for AirSonic to address (should they wish to - they could have done things the right way to begin with).

YouTube Music and iBroadcast.com do not need subscriptions to upload, at least at present.

Did he, though? I happened to speak to a senior engineer about that post, and was told it had many inaccuracies.

If the entire backend stack had been changed, none of the other apps - Sonos-made or not - would still be working. But they do. Therefore, it seems clear to me that we added, but did not subtract. The firmware updates since the new app came out have been fairly minimal in scope of changes made.

There have, however, been some issues that were further-ranging than we expected - for example, some people had grouping issues because the new app was/is not reporting firmware version variances on the system. But, it was the variance causing the issue, not the app.

We are sorry for the current state of affairs, and are doing our best to address them. Picking on people who are only trying to help won’t hurry things along, though.

Hi @j-pkeates 

We are aware of this issue and are investigating. You may be able to resolve the issue with the share being removed by following the instructions on this page: https://support.apple.com/102050.

I hope this helps.

I for one appreciate what you are trying to do here, but comments like “The firmware updates since the new app came out have been fairly minimal in scope of changes made.” are really unhelpful.

The one saving grace I had was that I hadn’t updated the Sonos App on my desktop computer, so I could still set alarms (this remains the case, by the way - alarms on the app still don’t work). I was, let’s just say, dismayed then to discover that despite doing my best to protect the one working option I had, that a firmware update had blown up my Library by listing every compilation album by track. This had the added ‘bonus’ that because there are now 1000s of ‘albums’ in my library, even the non-compilation albums aren’t accessible because the system is overloaded. Despite all of the updates that have been rolled out, and all of your kind words, my system has actually got worse since May 7th, not better. I am not alone.

Hi @Corry P 

Sadly many of the issues here are down to semantics and I do feel that some of the posts from users and Sonos miss the nuances.

Library access never failed for me because as it happens my NAS was configured for SMBv2. I also had enough technical knowledge to confirm this for myself.

But, for users who had SMBv1, many of whom may not have known this, it would have appeared that it stopped working when the update arrived. Some of these users would not have the technical knowledge to first identify that they were using SMBv1 and then reconfigure their NAS. I know that there have been a lot of details on how to fix this but given how many different NAS Systems exist this will never cover them all and some users had their systems installed by professionals so they could just play music and have never known, or cared, how it worked.

It may not be 100% true to say that the new App took away library access but it is also not 100% true to say that it did not if you look from the perspective of a user using SMBv1.

Same with the performance, I am one of those who see the “System Not Found” message. I also see slow responses to pause and volume change requests, I think the longest has been 30 seconds. For me, and many others, these are real issues. Again I am fortunate enough to be able to confirm that my local network is not the problem. 

I am happy for the users who do not have the performance issues. I accept that their experience is valid but so is mine and sadly there has been a lack of respect on both sides of these discussions.

By now we must have reached the pint where everything that can be said has been said and with that in mind things might be calmer around here if we all started thing twice before we post and as the question have I said this before, because I for one am pretty sure that I’ve repeated myself unnecessarily on more than one occasion and all that does is add to the noise. 

Hi @jun_man 

That particular sentence was trying to be factual and informative, not actually helpful. Help usually includes steps to follow, and I will provide those when and where I can.

The issue with duplicated items in the Music Library is due - regardless of how impactful it is - to a small change. The firmware of a speaker is in fact an entire operating system (based on a Linux kernel) and there are many ways in which it could change - those made since May have been minimal. This is another issue that we are investigating.

I too had to recently use the Desktop app to create a working alarm - again, we are investigating.

There are 3 moderators of this forum, and between the 3 of us, we read every single post on this forum. Please believe me - we know you are not alone. Things are improving for the majority of those affected, however, and each majority gets smaller as we progress. The biggest majority - believe it or not - are those entirely unaffected since before May.

I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to the community. Keep up the good work!

I hope it’s not a violation of Community Guidelines to say I disagree with several elements of your assessment, both those explicit above and the analysis that led to them. But your game, your rules, and so your call.

Hi @Gaham 

You are correct, but I refuse to introduce further inaccuracies into the conversation just to appease those who do not (or will not) understand the technicalities. To explain absolutely everything to a lay person would take more time and effort than I can possibly expend - for the full picture, someone would need to go to college or university, and then get a job with Sonos.

My words are often repeated in other threads, and I have to keep things as technically accurate as I can - this helps those users here who are technically literate help others in turn. I do try my best to be unambiguous, which often leads to sprawling posts such as my last few here, but there are limits to what I can produce off the top of my head.

I could not agree more! Emotions are currently high, however, and I don’t think those who are frustrated stop and think past their first, snap interpretation of what they think someone said. Similarly, others are not fully appreciating the emotive state of those who have perfectly valid complaints.

This is exactly why I ask people to report offending posts rather than reply to them - and it goes both ways (emphasis not directed a​​t you, ​​​​​@Gaham).

Hi @slworona 

You are free to disagree with me as much as you like. Infractions of the Community Guidelines are a different matter, however, and moderator decisions are final.

I am grateful for your help and explanation.

As we can both see, the problem is that the general public (especially the tech knowledgeable ones) are clinging on assumptions and crumbs of information about what happened and what changed.

Would it be possible for you to open the black box that is this system and write a deep technical description of what changed. A big part of your public are nerds and we want to know and all we got are vague statements and eventually the piece of support here and there and unofficial blog posts.

I for one, would genuinely enjoy a deep explanation of the tech stack, while it won’t really fix all of my problems, it will give me a better understanding of the situation.