Individual pause on speakers

  • 28 July 2017
  • 8 replies
  • 1592 views

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Hi, we have bought four Play 1 speakers for our office. We were told that users could mute the speakers if they needed to answer the phone for instance. Unfortunately this doesn't appear to be entirely true. When a user PAUSES their speaker, it pauses the whole group. So it isn't a mute function at all. We have the speakers grouped, because obviously in an open plan office we wouldn't want four different music streams, and playing the same stream on four ungrouped speakers would sound terrible as they wouldn't be synced.

Is there a way around this limitation?

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8 replies

Hold down the volume down button on the speaker and it will quickly go to a mute state, or there is a mute button next to the volume control on the app.
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Ah ok, the volume control thing might work. Having to go into the app won't as staff aren't running it, they screen share onto a Mac running it centrally. When the phone rings by the time you'd logged onto it and muted the speaker the caller would have hung up 🙂 Thanks for the suggestion.
Just a little background: The Play/Pause button on the Sonos units used to be a mute button. Unfortunately, many complaints came in because people were using it as a pause, without realizing that muting does not stop the unit from streaming. Thus folks were constantly streaming with no sound coming out and exceeding their monthly bandwidth limits. This caused Sonos to change it to a pause button, and the volume down compromise was put in place for those who wanted mute. Not ideal, but it (sort of) works.
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LOL, well there you go. You can't please all the people etc. If they had left the option to switch between the two modes that would have kept us all happy though 😉
LOL, well there you go. You can't please all the people etc. If they had left the option to switch between the two modes that would have kept us all happy though ;-)

True, but Sonos seems averse to many user configurable options. It seems to be their design philosophy.
Hold down the volume down button on the speaker and it will quickly go to a mute state, or there is a mute button next to the volume control on the app.

Technically it does not put the speaker into a mute state but rather just quickly turns the volume to zero. I would be fine using volume down for mute if it was a true mute that showed as mute on controllers and returned to the previous listening level when unmuted. The current setup is problematic if the speaker is part of a group because raising group volume will raise the "zero volume" player as well causing it to be unintentionally unmuted. It has never been made clear why, when moving the mute to volume down, the original "true mute" behavior was not retained.
*Yawn*
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Actually @upstatemike, that's a good point. In our situation, that kind of makes the 'volume down to mute' feature useless. The rest of the group will be adjusting the volume at points during the day, particularly as Sonos have yet to implement normalisation so tracks are often at greatly varying volumes.

I'm beginning to regret buying Sonos now. Should have done a lot more research.