Update on the Sonos App from Patrick Spence

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.