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.
.
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.
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.
@Ian_S NAS will support many users. For many reasons it was my decision to create a specific Sonos user with, originally, read only access and only to my music library folders. It would seem that with era300's that Sonos user now needs admin access to those same folders.
@Ian_S NAS will support many users. For many reasons it was my decision to create a specific Sonos user with, originally, read only access and only to my music library folders. It would seem that with era300's that Sonos user now needs admin access to those same folders.
Thanks! That’s interesting. I wonder if it’s just for Era series or all editions of Sonos speakers. However, I’m not asking you to test and clarify anything 😂
@Stanley_4 It may be a new Synology 'thing', a red herring or a new Sonos peculiarity with era300 speakers. I also added 100's, a sub4 and an ultra though so 🤷🏼♂️...
It is interesting that @Ian_S and I have had experiences that seem to align. I would posit it warrants further investigation by Sonos or someone with backend/firmware diagnostic access...
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.
.
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.
You miss my point. After all the fuss on here about how bad it would be to continue supporting SMB1, people are quite happy to assign full admin/control rights to an ID that should only need read access to stream music…
You miss my point. After all the fuss on here about how bad it would be to continue supporting SMB1, people are quite happy to assign full admin/control rights to an ID that should only need read access to stream music…
Exactly, and NOT remotely happy, a worrying necessity to get my music back ☹️
(and the Android indexing stinks too, and differs to the Windows app - which is better but...)
You miss my point. After all the fuss on here about how bad it would be to continue supporting SMB1, people are quite happy to assign full admin/control rights to an ID that should only need read access to stream music…
Since I took Synology off my list I don't really worry about their oddities.
My SMB server is happy with read-only access to the music share. I want it accessible by anything on my LAN so I don't restrict that.
Thanks for the reminder people. I just hang a SSD off my router and it started dying last weekend. Sure enough I hadn’t restricted write access to my music folder in the new one. Bit early to be sure but I think the little bit of instability I had since upgrading my Playbase to the Arc Ultra has gone.
@Corry P That is all very well but search from the Android app returns 0 entries for, as an example, various artists and still multiples for others… the windows desktop app is fine though 🤷🏼♂️
I feel this is more subtle than just tagging correctly, for example I have noticed interactions with indexing and composer tags. I also suspect that library size may have an impact as the issue seems to drift across artists…
Again the desktop app is consistent and seems to work much better with sensible, and expected, search results being returned. Maybe it is not the fundamental indexing at fault but the interrogation mechanisms of Android vs iThing vs Windows vs Mac apps?
Either way it is neither consistent or right... yet 🤞
