I can’t pair my Sonos Beam Gen 2 and Play:1 in order to shuffle through all my songs on Apple Music after the update. My Beam is hooked up to TV, Play:1 is in the kitchen. It’s a small apartment and they’re close together, I have a very strong Google Fiber connection, everything — phone and apps — are all updated.
My routine Sonos pre-update was to go to Apple Music, pair my phone to the Beam through Airplay, and then go to the Sonos app and connect the Beam and Play:1 as outputs. This way I could just go back to my Apple Music app to do whatever I wanted there and it would use my speakers as directed. Simple, repeatable, reliable.
What happens now is that I go to Apple Music, I connect to the Beam with Airplay, and when I go to the new Sonos App and connect the outputs it stops the music and forces me to use Apple Music through the Sonos app platform. Not the worst thing ever, but the problem now is that when I go to “all songs” in Apple Music via Sonos, there is no Shuffle option. It just plays one song at a time with no queue, even if I start by playing a random song and hitting the shuffle button.
Sure I could think of work arounds, but I don’t understand why this update has made every possible pathway of using music apps outside of the Sonos platform useless and unbearable, while at the same time making their own app suck.
Am I missing something though? Is the Play:1 too old or something? It worked fine pre-update. All I want is the simplicity I had before — Apple Music > Airplay to Beam > go to Sonos app to connect Beam & Play:1 > go back to Apple Music for full control. But that doesn’t work anymore.
I gotta say — I feel like Sonos fully misunderstood its majority base of casual users. This app is not a music platform, it’s a remote control, it needs to stay and feel pretty invisible and unintrusive, and now it feels like a huge pain to deal with.