Answered

Sonos Voice Control and individual Apple Music Family accounts

  • 18 September 2023
  • 2 replies
  • 390 views

Dear community,

My family consists of me (father), my wife and my two sons. We have SONOS speakers all over the house, among them Play One’s in my kid’s rooms. We all have the SONOS S2 app installed on our individual iPhones, and each of us is logged into his or her own respective account of Apple Music Family, also being logged in to each one’s individual account of the Apple Music Family service on each one’s SONOS app. The SONOS system is registered to me.

Obviously, we want to prevent that our four different music tastes are mixed. All works fine as long as the (Apple Music or SONOS) apps are used. Even when started by everyone’s SONOS app, the library, “recently played” section and music suggestions on the Apple Music accounts do not mix, it’s all allocated to the right account.

Now enter voice control. My sons have Sonos One’s in their rooms and I understand that only one Apple Music account can be allocated to the houshold’s Alexa. Then we tried Sonos Voice Control and initially got the impression that it all still works and stays sorted. We installed SVC on each of my son’s Sonos One using each one’s iPhone and thus, each one’s SONOS app. They are also only using it on their own speaker only. We were hoping for SVC to be connected to the Apple Music account on that iPhone which also is allocated to that iPhone’s SONOS app - and even used only that individual’s speaker).

But now the mystery starts. While initially, the “recently played” section on the Apple Music app of son 1 only showed what he started using SVC at his speaker, and he “recently played” section on the Apple Music app of son 2 only showed what he started using SVC at his speaker, it later started to mix up completely. Not only do these two profiles on Apple Music now mix up, but after 5 or 10 commands, also my “recently played” section suddenly showed what one of my sons played, even though we did not install SVC using my iPhone. While it mostly works, it seems to randomly add music to the wrong Apple Music profiles.

Did anyone experience this and is there a way around this? How can I make sure that using SVC at a certain speaker only, that was installed using a certain instance of the SONOS app, which is linked to a certain Apple Music Family account, links the played contents only to that individual Apple Music Family account? We were so glad when we recently experience SVC! Thank you.

Best regards,

The desperate father

 

Moderator edit: Changed “Play One” occurrences to “Sonos One” for technical accuracy

icon

Best answer by Corry P 19 September 2023, 10:31

View original

This topic has been closed for further comments. You can use the search bar to find a similar topic, or create a new one by clicking Create Topic at the top of the page.

2 replies

Userlevel 7
Badge +18

Hi @meytho 

Welcome to the Sonos Community!

The Sonos system stores all it’s settings and info on the speakers themselves, and all the speakers share that info so they each have a copy. Although there is a difference in what each app see’s in Recently Played, this is pretty much the only difference you will ever see between different apps on the same system.

When Sonos Voice Control is configured, that one configuration applies to all speakers on the system that have SVC installed - you cannot have a different music service account linked to different rooms in the Sonos app, nor can you do so with SVC (or Alexa). Only one music service account can be linked to SVC.

In short, what you describe is expected behaviour and there is no way to “fix” it.

An alternative might be to install a different voice service for each user (there are only 3 available, so perhaps you and your wife could share?) and link each one to a different account - this is the only way to isolate the playback histories from each other. Note that Google Assistant cannot be installed on Era 100, Era 300 or Move 2 speakers.

I hope this helps.

Hello Corry,

OK; thank you ver much! I was afraid that SVC cannot be linked to a certain family account. But your idea is great to use different voice services for different accounts. My wife and I are using the app anyway, so Sonos VC and Alexa should be fine with our kids. Thank you!

Best regards,

Thomas