Contributor I

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Sonos Voice Control with Local Libary and Plex through Sonos Playlist

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Hello everyone, My family currently using alexa to voice control our music that is hosted through plex on our local plex ubuntu server, though unfortunately we are loosing that feature in a couple days and I have been experimenting with sonos and SVC to try and find a alternate.

I have done a bit of creeping and have seen many post referencing that you can convert your plex music or use your local library to make sonos playlist that then can be used to play music through SVC. I have had limited luck getting things working by following these forum posts and was wondering if something has changed?

My system is set up with a shared drive over my network with Samba. I did have to open up my connection to SMB2 - 3 which was originally shared with just SMB3 for my plex server to get Sonos to link with my music library in the sonos app. Though I got it all up and running and everything works perfectly in the android app except voice control.

My problem is when I try and make sonos playlist to have SVC to play the music SVC can’t find the playlist and it either fails to do anything or auto plays sonos radio.

My first attempt was to link my plex server in the sonos app and then que up my plex playlist into my sonos music queue and then batch convert my music que into a sonos playlist in the sonos android app. I named them “Bangers and Mash” “Party” and “Feather”. Only Party works with SVC after the 24 hours wait. I tried to rename Bangers and Mash to just Bangers Mix and Feather Mix and waited another 24 hours to no avail. The only playlist that SVC will play is “Party”

After trying to trouble shoot this I ditched plex and took my shared music folder and plugged it in directly to sonos through the local music library option in the app. I had to open up SMB from SMB 3 to 3 max and 2 min and was able to successfully import my music library into sonos. I then made new sonos playlist using the local library music within my sonos app and waited 24 hours again. For these playlist I only added a couple songs per playlist, some with only 1 song to try to see if it works. After 24 hours none of these playlist work and would either fail or open sonos radio when prompted.

I have tried to rename the playlist,

The wake word I have used has been “hey sonos play my X playlist” and “hey sonos play my playlist X”

I have tried updating everything and power cycling the router and speaker which is a beam 2,

I have turning on and off SVC, swapping the langue SVC uses back and forth to reset SVC.

I have tried calling support two times and both times were very unhelpful with the phone techs not grasping what was going on or wrong. One even told me I just need to copy all my music to my windows desktop to have it “download” my music to the app which would then host my local music for me. When I told her I don’t want to have to keep my other computer on all the time to host my music she doubled down and said I wouldn’t have to and that the sonos app will host my music for me. She also told me the reason my other playlist were not working was because of copy righted music in the playlist even though all the songs in the failed playlist were also in my largest playlist “party” which was working. None of these interactions have instilled much confidence with support for me.

So here I am, hopefully I can get this working, any help would be greatly appropriated. I would love to replace all the alexas in my house with sonos 100s if I can get this up and running but on if it works lol.

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A

ajr88Answer

Contributor I

Well I figured it out @MoPac. I’ll leave the steps that worked for me as of 6/11/2026 to get sonos playlist to work with voice control with local media.

Step one: make a sonos playlists in the app (I used the android app) from either plex or your local sonos library. You can batch convert playlist into sonos playlist by adding your plex playlist to the now playing queue in sonos and then converting your now playing into a playlist. The option to directly convert the plex playlist to sonos is currently broken for me.

Step two: wait 24 to 48 hours

Step three: factory restore your sonos speaker that will be using voice control and reinstall it back into your system in the app. You can find how to factory restore your specific speaker on sonos support site.

Step four: enable voice control on the newly reset speaker.

And there you go, all of the playlist you made should be available through “hey sonos”. Without the factory restore none of my speakers were refreshing after the 24 hours to find the playlist. Hopefully this is fixed in the future.

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MoPac

Headliner III

So the M3U playlist from my local library Gals ( Sonos ) that I added to Favorites would not play. I neglected to open that playlist because my test was to see if SVC would play Gals ( Sonos ) when asked to do so. I just opened Gals… in the Sonos Favorites list a saw there is no content. Guess that’s why it won’t play!!

A

ajr88Author

Contributor I

@jgatie I understand your concerns about blowing away the diagnostic, though I only factory restored after calling support and had two pretty poor one hour plus calls that got nowhere with support, which at the time had access to the diagnostics. They came up with some pretty outlandish conclusions too so of which I have started before. I also messed with it on my own for around a week before finally trying to reformat.

@melvimbe For sure, these are some things I tried while trying to get this up and running. I creating the Sonos playlists and then tried:

-power cycling the speaker

-Power cycling the speaker after 24

-Changing the svc language from English to French and back to reset it

-Removing and reinstalling svc

-Removing and reinstalling svc after 24 hours

-Renaming Playlist in case it was name recognition failing

-opening up my smb from 3 to 2-3 for my shared music hard drive.

And probably some other test I can't remember off the top of my head. All and all it was about a week of trial and error.

At this point i gave up on getting svc to work. I went out and picked up a two pack of sonos 100s from Costco because they were on sale and I was planning on swapping them out for where we used to have echos.

To my surprise all the playlist registered and worked on the newly bought and installed speakers. I then tried my old speaker again and it still didn't work with svc. That's when I had the idea to wipe and reinstall my old speaker, which after the wipe and reinstall worked perfectly with svc.

I would recommend people start small and work up from there but for some reason with my personal experience and setup the reformat was the only think to fix the problem for me.

MoPac

Headliner III

Pardon my major brain fart. The Gals ( Sonos ) playlist in Favorites that showed no tracks, as shown in my above reply screenshot, was because the NAS was powered down due to a storm forecast that, of course, never came to fruition.

I will change that playlist name and try to see if SVC will play it.

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