This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Just as a way to soothe the outrage about this POS of an app: A fair share of the problem can be minimised by using Home Assistant and Music Assistant to control the Sonos devices. This way you very rarely need to actually use the app anymore.
Which is good because it's indeed shit.
Are the speakers themselves good though?
I’ll have to try Music Assistant - I use HA and the Spotify app
Literally just started doing this last week. I did NOT expect it to work so much better than the name-brand app for such a "closed system" as Sonos.
Sonos is the apple of speakers: great hardware, but overpriced and a walled garden.
I haven't had any luck with Music Assistant and my Sonos speakers. :(
I can add and select the speakers, select a track, everything seems to work right up to the point of actually playing music. It just stays paused and never switches to playing, no errors either.
That very much sounds like a network problem.
Are both hosts in the same subnet?
Yeah. I did see in the docs that there can be issues with Unifi networks, which I have, or with special setups but I did try a few of the settings it mentioned with no luck.
The only thing "special" with my network is I'm using a 10.x.x.x/8 subnet mask. The part that confuses me is the speakers are added with no issue.
Have a look at mDNS. It's very often the issue here.
I am using the same network - that’s no problem
I have to ask the stupid question but are they in pause? What if you hit the button on top?
When they removed the ability to listen to my local music library from the app I started looking for alternatives. Seemingly perfectly timed for the app to shit itself.
I found BubbleUPnP. It can cast to all of my Sonos and my Google assistant speaker with zero issues and can play from Plex, my phone's local library, and my NAS. Highly recommend. Three free version is usable but paid is only $7 and I no longer need the Sonos app.
If you use home assistant take a look at music assistant, it solves a lot of these issues for free.
I’ve had my Sonos sound bar controlled by HomeKit since the day I bought it and have never needed to fuck with their app.
I guess I got lucky?
Sadly you still need that POS to intially configure it and the occasional update.
No I didn’t actually.
I’ve never bothered with the app.
I just use airplay and let HomeKit handle it and have had absolutely 0 issues with it.
My appleTV discovered it and provided it to HomeKit and I was done.
Damn, I'm in the wrong business. Been making really bad decisions for free
Obviously. You could be the next Phil Harrison. Failed with Atari, got picked up by MS to lead Xbox. Failed with Xbox One, got picked up by Google to lead Stadia. Failed with Stadia and is currently keeping a low profile because he probably understood that failing any higher than Google is going to be a long shot.
He’ll probably show up at Ubisoft or EA, lol.
Or maybe even back at Microsoft to lead their handheld launch.
i don’t know if any of you lot have experienced the sonos app firsthand, but let me tell you that it is worse than you could possibly imagine. it takes ages to open, has a million buttons, and pretty much all of them are useless. it has a play/pause bar on the bottom of the app that does not go away. if you want to change your speaker settings, that’s hidden away in a menu (within the app) called “system settings”. why would they call it that?
the app makes you type in the wifi password when pairing a new speaker, even if that speaker has the ethernet cable plugged in. the app also doesn’t support certain wifi passwords so i had to change my wifi password before connecting my speaker.
Like I'm a programming dullard but they had to go out of their way to filter out allowable WiFi key characters? I don't see why they'd even bother...?
maybe they were afraid of bobby tables
I have an easier time using my Home Assistant dashboard to control my Sonos devices rather than the native app. Takes forever to load in Sonos but with HA, it’s near instant.
same here. as soon as i got the speakers set up i closed the app, never to open it again. i would have done this anyway, since i like to have all my things in one place, but the app certainly didn’t do itself any favors here
The worst thing they've ever done is remove functionality from the desktop app and have it exclusively in their mobile app.
I love the idea of Sonos. Being able to have whole house audio without having to run a shit load of cabling would be a dream come true, except they do it so badly it is often a nightmare.
Holy shit, this is quite the list.
As a Sonos user, yea - I hate the new app. The biggest annoyance is how long it takes to start up, because I don't have an IR TV remote I need to use the app to change the volume (or stand up and use the volume control on the side).
Golden parachute successfully deployed.
$1.8M is pretty small as golden parachutes go. Was probably the smallest amount allowed under his employment contract which avoids a lawsuit.
To paraphrase OP's body text, if I did a shitty job I wouldn't be receiving $1.9M checks in the mail.
I had 7 Sonos speakers. 2 months after they updated their app I sold them all and replaced them with the Denon 150s. I was such a Sonos booster and loved their products. Now they are a dead company to me.
Sonos basically failed their way out of me ever buying their shit. I bought a Wiim pro and am still using my Samsung soundbar from a decade ago. No complaints.
People like this clown really live in a reality of their own. Imagine being horrible at your job, just to be paid a fat lump of money
If I got that payout, I'd be able to retire...
Give that amount of money to anyone with the most basic of simple financial management and they wouldn’t have to work a day in their entire life while living a very decent life. Almost $2M at 5% growth, below the total historical performance of the stock market, is $100,000 per year for doing nothing except sitting on money. Any amount of that which is reinvested compounds exponentially.
I wish I could be such a PoS where I join a company, propose a massive investment into something, see it's failure and firing a bunch of staff, then bounce with a nice severance package to join a new company to repeat that over and over again.
Honestly the biggest issue is the rinse repeat part. Anyone can fuck up. But they just get to do it all over again because they have no shame.
Boards and executive suites are filled with people who repeatedly ruin companies and then just do it to the next one.
people who repeatedly ruin companies
You mean those bold leaders who have the rare ability to take risks* and make the tough decisions**?
** The decisions that will hurt people they don’t care about and won’t have to deal with, in order to hopefully make their “number go up” score improve.
"Go big or go home!" The CEO says as they fire 70% of their staff and now have to take a vacation to recharge at their summer beach house. His major concern? His severance package is only $3 million when his last place gave him $12 million. But this next coke-fueled idea will absolutely get them back to the top!
The Peter Principle in practice. A Quibi exec is taking over for him, I shit you not.
Quibi?! The streaming company whose business plan was so bad it lasted like 6 months. That sure inspires confidence.
Said another way, the company that broke production just hired the guy who ran the backend of Pandora Radio for 10 years and not once did he make headlines for an outage.
I feel like they couldn't make things much worse apart from just making the app say, "Lol, fuck you," every time you tried to do anything.
It's so bad, I've mulled just trashing the one speaker I have that I didn't even pay for, just to move to something better.
I am glad most of my devices couldn’t be upgraded to S2 anyway with the size of clusterfuck that turned out to be.
They freaking removed SMB/NFS playback. That’s like 90% of what I listen to.
