I thought I’d replace a Play:3 with an Era 300 as the app has behaved itself for a while and eventually added the alphabetic selection back to a local library…
I should have known better. At all stages of the process it’s been a shambles. I had two 30% credits on my account from old gear and buying a single 300 used both…
I then get a survey request asking me how I liked my 300 before it had even shipped, so I’m sure you can imagine the responses that got.
The Era 300 arrived today and wow, how absolutely unfriendly can you make the simple task of replacing a speaker with a new one? There’s still no way to remove a speaker from your setup. The best suggestion is to factory reset it… so did that with the Play:3, but the Sonos app now reports the old speaker as missing… brilliant.
Add the Era 300, the app detects it, but bombards you with popups saying hey I’ve found a speaker and then more popups to stop the popups… I just want to use the app to check stuff before I add the speaker. Do people feel unwanted these days if they aren’t bombarded with stuff on a screen constantly?
Try to play some local music (which is what I do most) on the new speaker and nothing from the local library will play on the Era 300. Try a re-index, no joy. It adds the music to the queue but then cycles through all tracks really quickly with more popups saying can’t play file in question.
Add a DHCP reservation on the network for the new speaker… Era 300 kindly ignores.
Factory reset the Era300 to see if it helps it a) pickup the DHCP reservation or b) kick the local library playing into action.
No to both. Still ignoring DHCP and still won’t play from local library. Other Sonos components still play from local library…
Era 300 appears to be on the latest software, as is the iOS controller used to do the ‘add’.
In my list of speakers I have two ‘Kitchens’ one with a warning triangle that was I presume the old Play:3 that perhaps will just vanish after a while?
Haven’t bothered to get Alexa going as there seems little point at this stage.
Well done Sonos. Still putting customer experience right up there.
Best answer by Ian_S
@Ian_S
There’s so much going on in this thread it’s difficult to determine what resolved your issue. As I mentioned I’ve had none of the issues you describe and for the record I upgraded to my Synology DS925+ after my system was configured with Era 300’s.
I’m married but my wife doesn’t mess with my Sonos configuration, NAS, nor anything that has to do with networking. So my second question is why would not all users and Admin have access to folders on your NAS. However, since the NAS is mine I’m both User and Admin😂. If that makes a difference in your case.
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Well, given all the fuss on here about SMB1 and it’s ‘dangers’… 😉
Also if you follow Sonos’ own advice on here on how to configure a Synology NAS with a new Era 300
You won’t get very far. Like many here I’ve been using a NAS for local music for a long time and had the library defined using the NAS name which has worked for YEARS (and is what the guide tells people to do) … So problem:
The Era 300 when first added would not play ANY files from the local library. All existing speakers still did. The issue here turned out to be needing to change the name to an IP address in the shared folder definition.
*If* The Era 300 then becomes the associated product, it will not perform either a re-index or add a new local library path unless the ID used to connect to the Synology NAS is in the ‘admin’ group. Again, existing speakers don’t have this behaviour and are quite happy with read-only or even read-write access.
The indexing behaviour of the Era 300 and previous speakers is different giving different (but consistently different) results when indexing your library. BOTH are wrong unfortunately.
Ignoring some of the (still) poor UI choices in the iOS app during setup, I don’t call that a particularly smooth experience and ought to be something Sonos could easily fix. I guess the fact that users get so ****** off at the end that they’re just happy it works and can’t be bothered to take it up further with Sonos also speaks volumes.
I no longer use Sonos for ‘serious’ listening as the iOS interface is atrocious and winds me up massively on an iPad where the UI makes no sense whatsoever, unless you like your music selection to be a swipe fest.
I ‘upgraded’ to an Era 300 as the Play:3 was lacking compared to some B&O Beolit 20’s I heard. Ok, the Era is a step up from the Play:3 but I don’t feel like I bought something better, and have just bought a ton of pain and am back in Sonos hell with broken local library indexing AGAIN.
Perhaps Sonos should employ the guy who writes Minimserver, if a one man band can write a decent indexing software I’m at a loss as to why a company the size of Sonos not only can’t correctly index music, but can’t even do it the same on different speakers.
To get the new IP to be accepted the easy path is to power down all Sonos, and reboot the router and controller then power the Sonos back up.
That may also solve the local library issue.
Change tne Room name of the removed speaker, the app will drop it in a few days. You might speed the process with a reset of the app, haven't tried that here.
To remove a speaker (Play:3) all you need do is unplug it. The app will continue to show the speaker as missing for a few days and then drop off. You can factory reset it later if you like.
If you intend to replace it with another speaker in the same room you should change the room name (of the Play:3) before you remove it. Then just place it in the new room. No factory reset required.
Addressing Pop ups…
The Play:3 is a speaker developed before Sonos started using Blue Tooth Low-Energy (BLE) to aid with setup. Also since then location services have been added as well. All those options make for a better Sonos experience. Declining the options to allow Sonos to activate those features/services may negatively impact setup. Then again I could be mistaken.
Setting up the Era 300…
To setup the Era 300 just follow the instructions in the app to “Add a speaker or component”. This will startup the process and :the pop-ups.
If you use the same name for the Era 300 as was used for the Play:3 you will have the same room showing twice. That’s why you need to either use a different room name (eg Kitchen Two) or change the name of the Play:3 before you remove it.
Constant factory resetting the Era 309 only causes more problems. If you are still having difficulty setting up the Era 300 I suggest you call Sonos Tech Support. They may also be able to help with your music library issue.
I had two 30% credits on my account from old gear and buying a single 300 used both…
Really? So you were able to stack the discounts for 60% off? Where did you buy from?
The Era 300 arrived today and wow, how absolutely unfriendly can you make the simple task of replacing a speaker with a new one? There’s still no way to remove a speaker from your setup. The best suggestion is to factory reset it… so did that with the Play:3, but the Sonos app now reports the old speaker as missing… brilliant.
You expect the speaker to not be reset to factory settings after you reset the speaker to factory settings? Or are you saying that part of the factory reset process to inform the app that the speaker is no longer a part of the system (not simply powered down)?
I had the same local library not indexing issue with a new 300. Sent it back to Amazon. Needs to just work. All the other Sonos devices in my home work just fine.
The controller cannot know why the speaker is not responding. The user might have temporarily powered down the unit while moving the unit to another area, cleaning or painting the area, or due to electrical work or utility power failure. It would be very inconvenient if the controller abandoned, requiring setup again, during these temporary outages. Personally, I like the feature of reminding me that player xyz is offline.
I had the same local library not indexing issue with a new 300. Sent it back to Amazon. Needs to just work. All the other Sonos devices in my home work just fine.
Your profile shows you own an Era 300. So I assume it’s working as expected. So possibly the first Era 300 was defective and had nothing to do with your music library not working properly.
I had the same local library not indexing issue with a new 300. Sent it back to Amazon. Needs to just work. All the other Sonos devices in my home work just fine.
Sonos developers really need to make that bolded bit priority ONE, having fully functional equipment returned due to user-frustration has got to be killing profitability.
That isn't just me, one of the kids recently turned down a gift of free Sonos gear. Reason "seems like more aggravation than music." The other kid took it but is only using it as a sound-bar on their TV.
In no particular order… no I didn’t get 60% off with two upgrade vouchers, I got 30% off but two vouchers disappeared in one upgrade. 😐
A full reboot of the mesh network cured the ignoring DHCP, but even though I powered down the Era300 for the network reboot, it took two speaker reboots for the Era300 to become functional again. The first reboot left it in some funny state where the app could see it, but virtually nothing worked. No idea what caused that. I had the Era 300 off while the network rebooted to try and avoid any odd behaviour with DHCP…
I only did one factory reset of the Era 300 just to see if it cured either the DHCP or the lack of local library access. It made no difference to either so there was obviously no point doing more.
I did a factory rest of the Play:3 as I didn’t want it coming back into the system if powered on as that would ‘reset’ any removal. I get that a factory reset won’t ‘remove’ the speaker, and that for example with my Roam 2, it may be quite a while between use, so keeping data in the system somewhere can be useful, BUT… there really needs to be a way to let a user remove a speaker they no longer want in their system. It’s not like that would be an accidental thing you could frequently do by pressing a button by mistake.
Why should I need to know that I should have to up front ‘rename’ a speaker to something else if I want my new speaker to be in the Kitchen and not Kitchen Two, or Kitchen New etc… It’s nonsense and yes I know some myopic pedant will disagree, but not being able to safely and simply remove old equipment is just lazy and counter intuitive. The interface when you are adding the new speaker even says there are zero products in ‘Kitchen’… that’s not really true.
Things I’ve learnt from this ‘upgrade’… Sonos still don’t care about existing users, especially those who’ve been with them the longest and use local libraries. We now have four classes of Sonos equipment it seems, S1, and in S2, what I guess is legacy, Play:1,3 and some others, sort of current, so One’s, SL’s, Ports, Amps and original Moves and then new (ish) with the Era’s and possibly the latest Arc Ultra… These now have different speaker/player firmware levels within S2 and behave differently… new stuff seems harder to use with DHCP reservations, I still can’t get my Roam 2 to use them, but as it’s not on all the time it’s less of an issue.
Which leads to the local library problem…
The ‘new’ stuff it seems can’t resolve SMB names as part of the music library path. I’m going to hazard a guess that the new stuff now uses a later embedded Linux kernel with different smb package… no idea why it behaves differently but surely this is easy for Sonos to recreate and fix? They must have some Port/Amps around which work with SMB names, so could create new Sonos system with one of these, add an SMB local library (I do doubt they have a NAS sometimes) with a name, then add a ‘new’ product to the system and look into why the SMB name isn’t working when added. It doesn’t appear you need some hugely complex setup to get there.
While they’re there… perhaps you could look at the add local library interface… SMB (natively) uses backslashes, \\nasname\sharename which the interface then transmogrifies to //nasname/sharename when displayed, which is confusing… maybe internally it converts to something like smb://nasname/sharename ? If it does, display it with the smb bit at the start so confused users can copy the correct format or a format that improves the chance of entering something correct. Also, make the connecting and the scanning a separate process so you know if the connection string is working or not and then trigger a background scan or ask… I was trying to add using an embedded IP without deleting my ‘working’ library, but it seems once I got the right format, the scan seemed to realise there were duplicates so the scan took a lot longer than usual. I ended up deleting the existing entry to speed it all up. Also begs the question that if the scan realises the named version and the embedded IP are the same, why doesn’t the Era300 know?
So I now have the Era300 working, but it was far from a friendly upgrade experience and quite disappointing. I was hoping that maybe Sonos had learned some lessons from the 2024 debacle, but it appears not much.
I had identical problem with a new speaker recently. I found that at some point Sonos dropped the ability to use share 'names' (i.e. //<my nas>/...) in the paths which for some reason stopped a new speaker picking up the content where existing speakers were fine. Replacing the name with the, reserved, IP (i.e. //123.456.789.12/...) and re-indexing solved the issue. Sonos playlists will (should) remain unaffected. There are thread(s) here with more discussion on this should you require more info.
The disconnected speaker will remain in the app for a day or two before disappearing. It will remain on your 'system' against your account untill it is re-registered against another account. I think you can ask support to remove it but not 100% sure on this.
I had similar reservations to you as well but I have to say, the 300's, in my case with an ultra, were worth teething troubles from a listening p.o.v... and apart from the ongoing search issues in the apps have been behaving well with my local library.
I’ve not done any exact timing, but I feel that the later S2 firmware requires more time to update the library index. It has always required more time to index a newly added share than running the index after updating a few tracks in an existing share.
I’ve had no trouble with DHCP reservations. I make my reservations soon after rebooting everything or adding a new player. I can imagine a potential glitch if a player renews its IP address while I’m making the reservation.
That made me think of something… obviously none of my devices are DNS registered, but mDNS functions. If I add .local to the NAS name and ping it, it responds. So tried adding using \\nasname.local\sharename didn’t work. So it looks like the only way to get a named local library is if it was created possibly on the old pre-May 24 app…
I deleted my library entry to try this … but now I’m stuffed… it looks like it finds the NAS and scans, but once the scan complete message comes up, no library entry… close & reopen app and it immediately scans again… now I have no local library … 😡 Re-adding with IP does the same… scan completes but no local library appears… FFS.
I wish I'd never mentioned anything now... If it is any help it was support that suggested IP vs name solution although at the time (October/November - ish 🤔) they were not 100% sure why the name route was failing but said there was a engineering ticket open.
I have seen the good index no content issue myself - a stickiness in 'new' shares indexing and being accessible (I recently renamed and reindexed mine) but it resolved itself. Although recent I cant remember any specific resolution, maybe a single speaker reboot maybe not, definitely not a full network or all speakers reboot - that I'd remember! I do recall that I let stuff settle and eventually had success using the windows app rather than Android. I also removed shares completely and replaced with a new, small, test share before trying again with my renamed pre-existing, shares which was successful. I had the impression it was a delay in propagation (of rename on NAS as much as anything else) or some overlap in Sonos holding paths that differed whilst actually referencing the same share 🤷🏼♂️
Assuming everything else is in place (SMB version, static IP, same network ect.) I can't think of anything else to suggest. Fwiw though support were, in the first instance, very helpful...
It looks like not only does the Era 300 not support named SMB shares, but it also really doesn’t do adding local libraries either. I switched to the Mac desktop app as I’d forgotten it still lets you manage local libraries and it has been a little more helpful with it’s messages… What it seemed to show was the add using the share (with IP) and ID/password ‘worked’ but was immediately followed by another message saying the share was no longer available… I’m guessing that this meant the indexing failed, so Sonos thought it had added the share, but because the indexing immediately failed, it wouldn’t show the share in the list as it looked empty… In the iOS app… it looks like it’s indexing, takes a long time, says it’s completed but nothing appears in the folder list, and you jus go round and round…
I’d also forgotten that in the desktop controller, it shows you the ‘associated’ node which is the one responsible for indexing. And the Era 300 was in charge.. mistake!! So I turned the Era 300 off, and then re-added with the exact same name, credentials etc. OK, the bad luck continued a bit in that it chose the slowest oldest node I had… but I left it to run and it successfully added the share …
Turned the Era300 back on, and the library is back and woking on all nodes again including the Era 300 ..
So, the Era 300 has two local library issues, 1) it can’t handle names for the NAS 2) If it’s the node in charge then it can’t do the indexing even with an embedded IP and the correct credentials.
So, if you are looking to replace existing speakers completely with new Era models, or setup a new system with a local library and Era speakers… good luck… you’re going to need it 😉
Have a stereo pair of Era 300’s (not to mention Era 300’s as surrounds) using a Synology DS925+ NAS to store my music and have never had any of the issues described in this thread nor the one mentioned by @craigski with my Sonos music library.
was, apart from needing the IP in the path, actually only some of the things I had attempted to get the renamed folders to reindex successfully. What specifically fixed it was:
* I have a specific user set up on my (Synology) NAS which had read only access to the shared music folders with no access to any others
* This had been working for many - 11/12 - years
* For some reason to actually get my renamed folders to reindex I had to change this access to that of an administrator (for the music folders only) to enable them to index
* This was not the first time my music folders had been renamed/added to or removed from Sonos BUT it was the first time any changes had been made with the Ultra and Era300's in my system 🤔
I have no real idea why this worked and no other obvious combination of user privilege, permissions or folder naming worked for me. I have tried, post index, revoking user permission back to read only but with no success, the Sonos user has had to remain an admin…
I never linked this to the era300 library indexing issue until now but with hindsight it would seem to be related?
I had intended to talk to support about this but, to be honest, can't be bothered currently...
@User117655 Thanks, that’s useful. Now I know I can get my library back ok after yesterday's mild panic, I might have a play seeing if that makes a difference. Would be interesting to know if others with newer Era models effectively have given admin access to their local libraries or not.
@User117655 I can confirm that both adding a local library or re-indexing an existing one fails on the Era 300 unless the Sonos user is added to the admin group. Then it works in so far as indexing in general ‘works’ …
@Ian_S Good work... It is nice to know a definite cause and workaround if not a definitive reason. There was enough of a gap for me between era300 addition and changing my library folders that I never made a connection between the two. I just got lucky I think when I hit on a 'fix' 🤓
Glad it resolved it for you, flagging @Corry P in case it is of interest...
