Premature disconnections, or the story of idiotic Sonos dementia

  • 25 September 2022
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  • Contributor I
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I have a very annoying ’problem’ with my Sonos speakers, that I’d previously spent ~£500 to remedy this ‘1st world problem’ by buying a 2 bay NAS with SSD’s.

Unfortunately, I’ve had to RMA one of the SSDs so I’m back to relying on my NAS’ with mechanical drives for the time being … so re-encountering this lovely ‘feature’ that is just downright annoying.

To explain and set the scene …

I add a folder of music from the NAS, say a 12 track album, then play the album ...

If the Sonos has to wait for the NAS to wake up, it’ll fails to play the first handful of songs, claiming can’t connect/lost connection and yet happily plays the rest of the album in the same folder on the same bloody NAS!!! Those ‘missing’ tracks are then completely unavailable to the Sonos now!

You have to physically yank the power cable for this situation to remedy even when the NAS is fully awake, as the Sonos refuses to accept that the ‘missing’ songs are there/playable.

I have 5x Play 5’s and 1x Play 3 set up in 3 ‘groups’ in different rooms in the house and this problem is present across them all, wired or Wi-Fi

If you’re midway through listening to an album, pause it, come back and start playing it again … oh joy, you hear the first 10 seconds of the next half a dozen songs as the Sonos craps out NOT waiting for the NAS to wake up and then plays the last half of the album no problems.

And you can’t just skip back to the songs that the Sonos skipped on, oh no, they’re ‘dead, lost, never to be found again’ even though the Sonos is playing track 7 onwards quite happily from the same folder on the same NAS!

You have to physically power down the Sonos = yank power cable, to clear I guess the cache and re-add the album.

Not the lovely convenience I’d expect from spending over £2,500 for!

This does not happen if the NAS is fully awake when you add and/or play the album.

This does not happen with my SSD stuffed NAS which takes a bit less time to wake up.

The biggest kicker is ..

SONOS: oh the NAS is asleep, can’t play that song, I’ll play 5 seconds, give you a BS error message and skip onto the next song and the next song and the next song, ooh look the NAS is awake, I can play this song and some more in the same folder on the same NAS as the songs I can’t supposedly find.

ME: but if you’re playing those songs, why can’t you play those songs, even if I skip back to them?

SONOS: nuh huh, those songs aren’t there … I looked, honest, I promise

ME: yes they are, they’re in the same folder you’re playing this song from?

SONOS: nuh huh …. BS errors

ME: skip back, skip 10 seconds into the supposedly unavailable song, SONOS PLAYS FINE!

SONOS: oh … well after this song the next one’s definitely not there ;-P

ME: wait’s for first supposedly lost song to finish, ignore BS error message, skip 10 seconds into the 2nd supposedly ‘lost’ song, plays fully,

Rinse and repeat for each supposedly ‘lost’ song each plays fine, except I’ve got to manually skip to the song and skip10 seconds into the song

Honestly … what the actual #@&%???

Every app on my phone waits for the NAS to wake up when accessing it, every program on my desktop or laptop waits for the NAS to wake up when accessing it.

So why is this problem present on my £2.5k’s+ of supposedly the BEST speakers???

Obviously, this isn’t a bug it’s a feature, your network stack is rubbish, and the Sonos doesn’t communicate properly with the NAS alike a phone, laptop, etc.

This is obviously the case if it is fixed by having the NAS’s on 24/7, ooh that’s good for my electricity bill, being green and saving the planet … not!

It’d be kind of OK if you could skip back to the songs the Sonos couldn’t play while the NAS is waking up, annoying but ok liveable, but the fact the Sonos refuses to accept that those songs are there in the same folder on the same bloody NAS that it’s happily playing the rest of the album from, but I can manually play them by skipping 10 seconds in WTF!?!

With a ‘power cycle’ being the only remedy to fix the Sonos’ idiotic dementia!

Disclaimer: have I searched the forum about this problem? no, this is a bug sorry I mean feature, there is nothing I can do or anyone else can do to fix it save for waiting for my RMA’d SSD or setting my other NAS’s so the mechanical drives never sleep, ooh at night I’ll cuddle up to those NAS’s too to get the benefit of the unnecessary electricity I’m wasting!

The problem is the Sonos is timing out too quickly and also is not rechecking the accessibility to tracks on the Sonos.

Disclaimer: do I expect Sonos to do anything about this? Nope, it’s abundantly clear from reading your forums over the past few years that ‘things’ customers want are ignored and alike most big companies you don’t give a rats’ ass about customers …. cough … volume levelling …. cough

I’ve had lots of ‘issues’ with my supposedly BEST speakers that I’ve seen there is absolutely no interest in resolving yourselves, Sonos, …. that’s why I remedied THIS PROBLEM by spending ~£500 on a 2 bay NAS with SSDs …. getting help, a fix, from Sonos is as useful and nice/fulfilling as peeing in the wind, does nothing save probably getting yourself covered in ….

A fix would be a timeout setting for accessing network resources, but the app and desktop program are dumb because you want to be like Apple, the Apps is crap too but that’s an entirely different rant.

Sonos - great speakers, crap software is what I tell anyone who asks.

And I bet this thread get’s removed pretty quickly!?!

 

 

 

 


4 replies

Userlevel 7
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I don’t expect the thread will be deleted; it will probably be censored slightly to remove bad language, which is not permitted under the terms of use you accepted. 
 

As to the rest of the rant… I hope you feel better now you’ve vented. 

What I read out of that is an issue with your NAS, not with Sonos. Sonos seems to be following standard network protocols. And no, I wouldn’t expect Sonos to delete your complaint, that’s not behaviour I’ve ever seen, sometimes to my chagrin. 

I can’t say I’ve seen many people complain about the HDD spin-up time of their NAS boxes, over the years, for library access by Sonos - those that (rarely) do, often appear to have latency issues elsewhere across their network, or faulty hardware. Anyhow…

I have a Netgear OS 6 NAS box and it’s HDD’s regularly spin-up/down each day. I can’t recall ever having an issue with playback on the (SMB) linked Sonos music library.

I also have not seen any issues with the separate Sonos Plex service accessing the same library on that box, either locally, or remotely. Certainly no skipping of tracks during Sonos playback etc. either with the current, or previous, versions of the Sonos software.

As with most (decent) NAS boxes using HDD’s, in my own case, there are the ‘usual’ options in it’s OS settings to schedule various power settings for the Drives and to disable their spin-down option completely anyway. I just choose to leave mine spin-down after 20 minutes of inactivity.

Just to also add, I too would not expect Sonos/moderators to ever delete the complaint here either.

What a lot of hysteria, all over a temporary issue (pending the SSD replacement) which in any case can be worked around. “First world problem” truly sums it up. 

To avoid any playback timeouts, browse album artwork on the controller first in order to force a drive spin-up. I recall this technique being used at least 15 years ago.

And if, for some reason, a player cache ends up stuck thinking a track is unavailable, play some other music before returning to the tracks of interest.  

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In passing I’d also note that the use of the word “dementia” is thoroughly inappropriate, and could well cause offence.

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