Update on the Sonos App from Patrick Spence

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.

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 [1] 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.