Set up new Roam 2

What do you want to play on the Roam2? I believe it can be Bluetooth paired out the box so you just play to it from your phone. 

Thanks for your response.

I don’t store any music on my phone at the moment so haven’t anticipated using the bluetooth function, but thanks for that advice. 

My music folder is on my iMac so ideally I would like to play music and playlists from that folder. I also occasionally stream from Spotify and of course radio.

I know very little about Roams so didn’t ask for one. My daughter bought it for me as a surprise gift believing it would be a useful addition to my current set up for which I’m very grateful so really want to get it working.

The old S2 app on an old device isn't probably going to work as usually when you add a new speaker it insists on upgrading, so you will be forced into the latest version. If you don’t upgrade then usually it disables setting anything up which could be what you are seeing.

I can understand your nervousness, 

As someone who mostly listens to my own music from a NAS, I would suggest you will be much happier with S1 for now. The new app/ecosystem has many deficiencies if your main source is local music. 

I think the safe option is as Ken suggests above. Power off all your existing S1 speakers and then install the new Sonos App on your phone, verify it has left the old S1 app untouched. Then attempt to add just the Roam 2 in the new app… It can’t update speakers that are not powered on. 

What I don’t know is if it will constantly nag you to add your S2 compatible speakers from your S1 system into the new one. That would be annoying and on current Sonos form entirely possible. 

Where you WILL come unstuck in getting the Roam 2 to see the music library on your Mac. I’m guessing you used the Mac Sonos desktop app to add your music library from the first of the three options it presents. What that option does, is add Sonos HTTP helper software to your Mac that allowed your S1 speakers to gain access to your music folder through the HTTP protocol. Unfortunately, at the same time they launched the new app, they also disabled the HTTP (and SMBv1 for older NAS drives) protocols in the speaker firmware, so your Roam 2 will NOT be able to access your music on the Mac… 

It is fixable, but will also change how your S1 system accesses your music too which you may not want to risk at this stage. Of course if the Roam 2 proves too tricky to add it may not matter, so I guess one step at a time !! 

Perhaps one way around the library sharing issue, might be to upload the local tracks to the iBroadcast cloud service and then stream that via the new Sonos App ‘iBroadcast service’ to the Roam 2.

edit: Just for info. here is iBroadcast in action via the new Sonos App (using iPad controller). See attached…

Thanks for responses

When I buy a new CD I add it to my iTunes library but don’t use iTunes folder instead using iTunes preferences the music is stored in a folder on an external portable hard drive. A copy of that folder is on my iMac so I then copy the additions or changes to the folder on my iMac. The folder on my iMac is the feed to Sonos so next step is to go into the S1 app on my iPhone and update music index. That works fine with what I have now and was hoping the Roam, once set up, would be similar? If not how does a Roam access music other than by bluetooth? Sorry not techie enough to understand everything in your replies.

EDIT:

Having never used the S2 app, or the new one, I’ve no idea how it will look or function. I just automatically assumed the basic music feed process would be the same. If the Roam won’t be able to access my music library I will just have to disappoint my daughter and ask her to return it.

Long story short, it’s unlikely to work thanks to recent changes Sonos have made. You can try, but I would expect the Roam to give an error. You will need to download the non-S1 Mac OS app from Sonos and when your try and add the folder initially there, the same way you did for your S1 system, and index, I’d expect an error. Trying to follow the ‘fixes’ for that may well get confusing, especially if you want to keep your S1 system as is and you’re not techie enough to understand what’s going on. And I don’t mean that in a patronising way, as this stuff should just work in a home environment without needing such deep levels of understanding. 

In terms of other music, for Radio Sonos has also dropped the old TuneIn support, so you might not like those changes. Spotify should work, not withstanding any normal restrictions on numbers of streams etc. 

Your daughter has been lovely and generous, but may have unwittingly exposed how out of touch Sonos have become at present. They may redeem themselves, but if they do, there’s little sign of it being a quick redemption five months after they dropped App-maggedon. 

Ken, I’d not heard of the iBroadcast function before. Does it have a limit to how much music you can upload? I have about 3000 CDs on my system, and is the upload process speedy or cumbersome?  Seems that Sonos don’t want people to play their own music collections. Very disappointing if that is the case when that was the sole purpose for me in buying the system.

I have uploaded 25,697 tracks so far - it took a while to do that. I have seen others say they have uploaded 90,000 tracks.

The only limit I’m aware of, is that a single track must be smaller than 1 gigabyte.

Thanks very much Ken - I’ve just had a look at the iBroadcast website which is very informative. I don’t think it’s for me though as it looks like a full time job uploading all the CDs. I’m 75, I don’t have time!!! 

Thanks for that further explanation Ian. It looks like the Roam 2 is on its way back as I simply wouldn’t get very much use out of it. Excitement turns to disappointment in just a few hours. Oh well!  

It’s a real shame as the Roam 2 is a decent little speaker once working. 

One thing it may be worth doing in parallel is looking a cheap NAS device to host your local library. This should work with both S1 and S2 Sonos systems in the same way and would be useful preparation should you ever decide to move to S2 for other reasons. By then the S2 local library experience may have improved… 😉

The iBroadcast upload is literally a case of starting the library upload and just leave it running until it’s finished. It costs nothing to do that and it’s a further backup of your music library (offsite) should anything happen to your locally held library, plus the tracks are accessible to you worldwide at any/every location you have access to the internet. I’m in my mid-60’s and if I can do it, I’m sure you, being older (and wiser), will soon be able to sort it out.

It’s much better than telling your daughter that you do not want her gift, eh🤔?

Hi Ken, I got the impression from what I read that I’d have to upload each CD separately if not that makes a big difference. Still worried a bit though about how everything might be sorted as I’m quite picky, which is why I chose not to use the iTunes folders to store the files. Old school, I like to be in control, not keen on these intuitive processes they don’t tend to have the same intuition as me!!  I’ll give it some more thought though, thanks.

Obviously it’s entirely a matter for yourself, but my thoughts are to perhaps initially try a couple of ‘Artists’ and their ‘Albums’ etc. just to begin with, as a bit of a trial run. There’s very little to lose by doing that as a quick test, other than your own (valuable) time.

Then you can perhaps decide if it’s for you, or not.

Tell me please, if I went down the other route of using the new app for all my speakers, apart of course from the oldest ones - the S5s. Those speakers could surely access my music in the same way as the S1 app? and, if so could I group the Roam with those speakers and then play the music on the Roam? It’s all more than a bit confusing. I did read that doing that might mean continually have to re-goup the Roam with the other speakers.  I think I'd be better with another Play 1 and a long extension lead !! 

It’s not the Roam 2 that will have issues, it’s the new software. So if you update any of your existing speakers they’ll have the same issues. 

For local libraries (and one’s shared from your Mac/PC especially) issues are:

• No alpha-jump, so no letters to quickly get to an artist. you have to scroll endlessly by swiping and swiping. Gets very tedious. 
• Indexing of any album where you have more than one contributing artist that doesn’t match the album artist is currently broken. Has been for almost 3 months now. Compilation albums are particularly badly broken as you might expect. If a compilation has 100 different tracks by different artists the album appears 100 times in the index.
• Queue editing is only partial and not intuitive yet. No ability to save a queue contents to a playlist. 
• Album artwork display is sporadic, generally not available when there’s a list of things on display. Likewise playlists. 
• Lists seem to have arbitrary limits, some 50, some 100 some 500, but playlists seem most badly impacted here. 
• No playlist editing. 

The new app is very streaming centric, and local library users are left to feel a bit 2nd class. The queue/playlist limitations are most puzzling as these impact anyone, unless you stream direct from Spotify and don’t use the Sonos App…

And that’s the state of play after 5 months of slowly adding back lost features…. 

That’s absolutely dreadful Ian, far worse than I imagined even though I was aware that Sonos users were not happy with the new app. Thank goodness I stuck with S1. It’ll do me until they stop supporting it. I suppose Sonos are thinking along the lines that the numbers of people who prefer streaming are increasing rapidly whereas old fossils like me who like to listen to music they’ve collected are equally rapidly declining in numbers. 

In view of the great help given above I thought I’d just provide an update.

I decided to keep the Roam 2 and downloaded the new Sonos App onto my iPhone. I then added music to my iPhone but as the phone wasn’t compatible with the iTunes app on my old 2010 Mac Mini I had to first of all duplicate my music library onto the Music (iTunes) app on my newer iMac which took a while. Doing all that allowed me to familiarise myself with the New Sonos app, the Roam itself and the bluetooth function. I was impressed by the Roam’s performance.

I later looked further into how to use Airplay and discovered that by linking my airplay devices (iMac, Beam and Roam 2) in ‘Music’ on my iMac I could play my whole music library through those devices. And, because my Beam is grouped with my other speakers on the S1 app I can also play my music simultaneously through my Roam 2 and grouped S1 speakers. They remained perfectly in sync for about an hour but pausing and re-starting play immediately reset the sync. Not perfect but better than I thought I might achieve until I am able to add my music folder to the new Sonos App. As I also have the Apple ‘Remote’ app on my phone I can use that as a controller to search and play my whole library.

I have tried many times to add my music library folder to the new Sonos app following all the Sonos guidance precisely, but it fails when I hit the final stage of the process stating that access to the folder is denied because the user name and/or password is incorrect. I know it isn’t incorrect but have tried any slight variations I can think of. Under the S1 system a password wasn’t required and I had no problem adding the folder to that system about a year ago. Is this a problem with the new App or unique to the Roam or might there even be something I haven’t fully understood? I have checked that I have the latest version of the Sonos app.

Any help on that would be appreciated.

Moderator edit: duplicate posts removed