Prodigy III

Answered

Why did I bother...

39 replies
910 views

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.

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.

I

Ian_SAnswer

Prodigy III

@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.

Show previous replies

I

Ian_SAuthor

Prodigy III

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.

User117655

Prodigy II

@Ian_S Oh bl**dy 'ell!

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...

I

Ian_SAuthor

Prodigy III

So… some minor progress… (chat support hopeless)

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 😉

C

craigski

Local Superstar

User117655

Prodigy II

Oh.... I'd forgotten about that thread @craigski . Glad you got sorted @Ian_S , hope you enjoy the era's and they were worth the hassle 🤓

AjTrek1

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.

The path is simply:

//IP address of NAS/music

Together Everyone Achieves More = T.E.A.M.