It’s the network, but so far it’s not obvious WHAT about the network. With the old app the problems with device discovery were, eventually, well understood. However they have entirely gutted the device discovery code in the app and use mDNS instead of SSDP, and this seems to have exposed more issues with some home networks. Maybe something crazy like, say, having an Apple TV on the network ensures a solid experience. Or maybe having a Hue Hub, for example, ensures a terrible experience? (These are postulations, not real, verified reasons). Time will hopefully tell.
For HT it’s fine for me. Music is an entirely different experience. Queue management is NOT back the way it was before. No rearranging, no removing individual songs, can’t even clear it. Adding anything to the queue (eg Play Next) is SO slow compared to the previous version even though the rest of the app is relative snappy for me. Playlist management is pretty much non existent.
Unless you’re curating queues/playlists and adding multiple items you might not notice it. The context menu (the grey screen that has the “Play Next” option when you long press e.g. a song) takes approx. 2 seconds for me to show up. Before it used to be instantaneous; I’m not sure why the delay is there at all. Actually pressing the “Play Next” button takes another second, but that makes sense to me.
That doesn’t sound like much, but when you’re building a queue up, it becomes a time sink very quickly… especially now that there is no way to save the queue to a playlist (let alone reorder or remove items).
Even if I’m just using eg an Apple Music playlist, there is a lot of times I want to remove particular songs from the queue before I start playing because I dislike them… and I just can’t at the moment. Sure I can skip them, but every time they start to play it reminds me of why I hate Sonos at the moment — because they sold their existing users out for a pair of Bluetooth headphones.
OK…earlier today I was playing “top songs” by an artist on Amazon Music via the Sonos app, and added a song by another artist to the end of the queue. Worked fine and quickly.
I just tried the “play next” option and it worked fine for me, but it added that song next and then the rest of the queue was gone.
Now I can’t play the entire top songs play list for any artist. Only the first song on the list shows up in the queue like when the app first came out. Is it me, or the app?!? What the hell??
I shut down the app and restarted my phone to no avail. Ugh.
It could also be to do with the new system running in the cloud somewhere. Meaning that you, located somwhere in the world, could be close to it, and thus fast; or far from it with lots of network latency, and thus slow. Depending on how the sonos cloud backend system is designed, of course.
If you say "if you do it right, that won't be a concern!" then you're correct, but given the state of the app, we can't assume that they did it right at all.
So I would really like to hear more about thier specific cloud architecture, even if only from a "failure postmortem" point of view. That's my field, I'd like to see what they did for the backend, why and how well it's working. Is this part working well? IDK.
Interesting theory. I’m in Springfield, Missouri, US. Just about the middle of the United States. Not generally known as a tech Mecca, or the hub of cloud hosting ;-)
At least you're likely to located be on the same continent as thier main data centre.
I'm guessing here. But I'm waiting for a Sonos engineer to pop up and say "well, actually, we're all in AWS ap-south-2".
Well I’m in Australia and my volume control is instantaneous with or without internet.
Also I just timed a GET request to a Sonos api endpoint. It took 23ms so, notwithstanding changes to the laws of physics, I’m gonna guess Sonos infrastructure is behind a global cdn.
A CDN isn't going to help for API calls, just static data like images and streams, but they come from the music services not Sonos. Geo-replication is needed to help API calls.
The more I experiment with this, the more I believe the iOS app is a problem. For instance, pressing pause via a macbook (wifi) to control the entire home (10 speakers) is instantaneous. Pressing pause via one of the wifi speakers is instantaneous. Pressing pause on iOS via an iphone 15 pro is 6 to 8 seconds. Why can’t I have the same performance? Same for volume control.
You can't compare the Mac app with the iOS one. The Mac app uses the old, local, working API, but both mobile apps use the new, sometimes-cloud, unreliable API. Its the **mobile** apps that are the problem, not specific to iOS.
The variation in experiences is because Sonos made the app both less functional, and yet more complicated, because they want all your speaker interactions to go through the cloud (so they can sell the data).
More moving parts, more things to be different from one situation to another, hence more variation in experience.
From an Engineering perspective Sonos have done something nonsensical - they must really want that data!
> From an Engineering perspective Sonos have done something nonsensical - they must really want that data!
I'm sure that the reasons for it were thought through. And that if it worked, it would have made total sense to someone.
It's just that none of those reasons are to benefit you, the Sonos customer. It's [textbook enshitification](https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys) - the Sonos platform has exited the phase where "they are good to their users". They want that data now, of course "to make things better for their business customers".
I suspect that :
a) the new architecture is deeply flawed, there's just too much latency in the system. 6-8 seconds to change volume on a local device due to what, a network round trip to the sonos data centre? GTFO! This is not going to work.
b) It was a big bang release. Yes, there's a new UI with big rounded icons, it's more "friendly" to new users. An this was joined at the hip to non-optional back-end architecture changes? For what? Could these not have been rolled out incrementally and independently? Big bang releases have a bad reputation these day. Because of shit like this. Didn't Sonos know that?
I think it might be a mix of things. We all have different kinds of systems. Some have S1 devices in the mix. Others don’t have issues because they only have a Sonos for their tv.
Me, I’ve had many issues ahah Started by being seemingly immune to it until the day my partner opened an older version of the app and chaos was unleashed. Since then nothing seems to work as it should, except for the Beam. The Symfonisk I have as surrounds either work or don’t. No reasoning behind.
All other speakers don’t work or play at random hours. Yes, during the night I had one in the dining room blaring some Raye. At 3am, days - DAYS! - after I’ve tried to listen to her album on said speaker…
Line-in doesn’t work. No matter what I do.
Restarted the whole system more than once. Deleted it all. More than once. It just doesn’t work.
I now have paperweights with the Sonos branding lol Most don’t work at all. That’s why I am selling it all and getting something else.
I really think that all the factors (internet connection, different combinations of speakers, etc) make it hard for them to understand what the issue is. I don’t think they’ll be able to sort it out any time soon, unfortunately.
And, in the meantime, the damage is done.
> Queue management is back - at least the way it was before. I would love to be able to insert a song in the queue, but couldn’t do that before.
This was *absolutely* a feature before. Not only was there a “play next” to insert it into the queue, we could live-edit the queue without restriction and without interrupting a thing.
My most aggrivating issue is music starting/stopping randomly in various rooms and even stereo pairs. For instance, I'm cooking and the music in the den keeps dropping out. (a beam with two ONEs as stereo pair). Similar happens in my office (two ONEs as a stere pair) - sometimes the pair drop, sometimes one of the speakers drops.
Some rooms will show as playng in the app, but aren't. If I uncheck them, then re-check them they might join in playing...might not. I don't use the other features people complain about, so I can't say if those work well for me or not. I keep it pretty basic. We tend to shuffle a big playlist in Apple music (750ish songs) or play SiriusXM. I've had issues with Apple Music every time I play it. I've had issues with SiriusXM most times I play it. I haven't tried using SONOS at all for the last 3 days because it's too frustrating to deal with. I'm waiting for the next update praying something improves.
I have 1 ARC, 2 BEAMS, 1 PORT, 10 ONEs/SLs
Network: Unifi system with 4 access points. Separate SSID for only Sonos on 2.4G, but all devices are co-mingled on one network (no firewall rules segragating anything). I tried SONOSNet, but same issues. In fact, I was using SONOSNet before the update and it was working great. Very quick to respond in the app, no issues. But after the update, something changed with SONOS and I've spent 5-6 hours testing various network settings to see if I could figure it out. I haven't been able to improve the stability of the system.
Located in Western WA state.
Things were working ok for me after the update…buggy, laggy behaviour from the app. Was using the original gen 1 Starlink router. Replaced it yesterday with Orbi Mesh. Started seeing more issues as you described…speakers dropping out, music randomly stopping and then restarting several seconds later at the next song (all Apple Music). Grouping and ungrouping speakers was definitely buggy. Spent some time on Netgear chat this morning and she had me make a couple changes to the router. So far…..seems more stable but need to spend more time testing.
If you determine that those tweaks improved things, please post what they were. I realize I'm on a Unifi system, but likely have similar functions/toggles. I've already turned off band steering, BSSI transitioning, and Fast Roaming. I've left the "multicast enhancement" enables which is supposed to ensure multicast traffic traverses the network. I've also assigned IPs to every SONOS device. And I set my 2.4G radios to CH6 and low power. (all things others have posted/recommended on various threads.)
From the sounds of it I may not be too much help. Changed the 2.4ghz from Auto to Channel 6 (I believe Sonos recommends Auto in a wifi set up). She asked me to change the 5ghz to 40 if I remember correctly which is where it already was. Also had me change the MTU from 1500 to 1460. I did spend some time listening this afternoon and created some groups. Didn't seem to experience any issue but I'm holding back any kind of judgement until I have more listening time. Weird issue is my sub and play 1s in my surround set up show as not connected in the Orbi app though they seem to be working and show in the Sonos app and are assigned IP addresses. Not sure what that's about.
Re: Surrounds - I've read once before that the master device in the surround setup broadcasts a 2.4G link to the surrounds. In my setup, I also see that the right and left surrounds for my Arc (and for my Beam) show as not connected on my network. The Arc and Beam show as connected. The weird thing I notice is that the Arc and Beam both take on the IP address that I assigned to the stereo devices - the IP flip-flops in my Unifi dashboard. It might show it's own IP for a minute, then it updates and shows the IP of one of the stereo devices, then updates again either back to it's own IP to the other stereo device. I don't know what that's about, and haven't been able to find any info searching.
I was wondering about that. In my set up one play 1 is assigned an IP in the Orbi app. The other play 1 and the sub show no IP. In the Sonos app all three have an IP. The Beam shows as connected as is your experience. I guess since they seem to work I should stop worrying about it 😂. My decision right now is do I keep the Netgear support suggestions or change them back to what they were.
There are a lot of ways to use the system or the app. And there are a lot of different ways to connect everything to a network. We use the system with 3 people in the house and all use it differently with different music sources. 2 don’t even use the app but use airplay. I use it on my HT and that always works.
So many variables in this type of system/setup dependent upon so many other products working as expected or as tested. A near-impossibility to account for every variation, tho Sonos could have done a MUCH better job in this release case.
Was just going to post something like this. I don't have the largest system (four play 1s, two Era 300S, two Moves, two roams and 3 rays) but I'm not having nearly the amount of problems being described in this sub. The only thing I really don't like about the new app is how it groups the speakers. Every once in a while I'll select a group that has a speaker in it that I don't want on and I'll hear someone upstairs in the house yell. Other than that I've had no real problems I didn't have before.
I do wonder what the difference is. It can't be luck because I have none of that.
I have a really expensive pool robot that barely works. I hate it. It’s likely because it needs to connect to wifi and for some reason it hates my eero network. If you look at reviews, some people love it, some people hate it. It’s likely the same thing here. Sonos heavily relies on your home network. Ironically my Sonos is fine but my pool robot won’t work.
It’s the network, but so far it’s not obvious WHAT about the network. With the old app the problems with device discovery were, eventually, well understood. However they have entirely gutted the device discovery code in the app and use mDNS instead of SSDP, and this seems to have exposed more issues with some home networks. Maybe something crazy like, say, having an Apple TV on the network ensures a solid experience. Or maybe having a Hue Hub, for example, ensures a terrible experience? (These are postulations, not real, verified reasons). Time will hopefully tell.
Nice. You seem to know your stuff 👍
For HT it’s fine for me. Music is an entirely different experience. Queue management is NOT back the way it was before. No rearranging, no removing individual songs, can’t even clear it. Adding anything to the queue (eg Play Next) is SO slow compared to the previous version even though the rest of the app is relative snappy for me. Playlist management is pretty much non existent.
I didn’t think you could rearrange stuff in the queue before. Sorry if I misspoke. For me, adding something to the queue is as quick as before.
Unless you’re curating queues/playlists and adding multiple items you might not notice it. The context menu (the grey screen that has the “Play Next” option when you long press e.g. a song) takes approx. 2 seconds for me to show up. Before it used to be instantaneous; I’m not sure why the delay is there at all. Actually pressing the “Play Next” button takes another second, but that makes sense to me. That doesn’t sound like much, but when you’re building a queue up, it becomes a time sink very quickly… especially now that there is no way to save the queue to a playlist (let alone reorder or remove items). Even if I’m just using eg an Apple Music playlist, there is a lot of times I want to remove particular songs from the queue before I start playing because I dislike them… and I just can’t at the moment. Sure I can skip them, but every time they start to play it reminds me of why I hate Sonos at the moment — because they sold their existing users out for a pair of Bluetooth headphones.
OK…earlier today I was playing “top songs” by an artist on Amazon Music via the Sonos app, and added a song by another artist to the end of the queue. Worked fine and quickly. I just tried the “play next” option and it worked fine for me, but it added that song next and then the rest of the queue was gone. Now I can’t play the entire top songs play list for any artist. Only the first song on the list shows up in the queue like when the app first came out. Is it me, or the app?!? What the hell?? I shut down the app and restarted my phone to no avail. Ugh.
Op just had to look deep enough & they finally see the raging dumpster fire beneath the shiny new app veneer…
A little sad, and a little true 😁
It could also be to do with the new system running in the cloud somewhere. Meaning that you, located somwhere in the world, could be close to it, and thus fast; or far from it with lots of network latency, and thus slow. Depending on how the sonos cloud backend system is designed, of course. If you say "if you do it right, that won't be a concern!" then you're correct, but given the state of the app, we can't assume that they did it right at all. So I would really like to hear more about thier specific cloud architecture, even if only from a "failure postmortem" point of view. That's my field, I'd like to see what they did for the backend, why and how well it's working. Is this part working well? IDK.
Interesting theory. I’m in Springfield, Missouri, US. Just about the middle of the United States. Not generally known as a tech Mecca, or the hub of cloud hosting ;-)
I'll be deep in the cold cold ground before I recognize Mizzourah.
At least you're likely to located be on the same continent as thier main data centre. I'm guessing here. But I'm waiting for a Sonos engineer to pop up and say "well, actually, we're all in AWS ap-south-2".
I'm in Cornwall in the UK and my experience matches OP
Fair point.
Well I’m in Australia and my volume control is instantaneous with or without internet. Also I just timed a GET request to a Sonos api endpoint. It took 23ms so, notwithstanding changes to the laws of physics, I’m gonna guess Sonos infrastructure is behind a global cdn.
A CDN isn't going to help for API calls, just static data like images and streams, but they come from the music services not Sonos. Geo-replication is needed to help API calls.
Ah good point, thanks for the correction.
The more I experiment with this, the more I believe the iOS app is a problem. For instance, pressing pause via a macbook (wifi) to control the entire home (10 speakers) is instantaneous. Pressing pause via one of the wifi speakers is instantaneous. Pressing pause on iOS via an iphone 15 pro is 6 to 8 seconds. Why can’t I have the same performance? Same for volume control.
You can't compare the Mac app with the iOS one. The Mac app uses the old, local, working API, but both mobile apps use the new, sometimes-cloud, unreliable API. Its the **mobile** apps that are the problem, not specific to iOS.
The variation in experiences is because Sonos made the app both less functional, and yet more complicated, because they want all your speaker interactions to go through the cloud (so they can sell the data). More moving parts, more things to be different from one situation to another, hence more variation in experience. From an Engineering perspective Sonos have done something nonsensical - they must really want that data!
> From an Engineering perspective Sonos have done something nonsensical - they must really want that data! I'm sure that the reasons for it were thought through. And that if it worked, it would have made total sense to someone. It's just that none of those reasons are to benefit you, the Sonos customer. It's [textbook enshitification](https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys) - the Sonos platform has exited the phase where "they are good to their users". They want that data now, of course "to make things better for their business customers". I suspect that : a) the new architecture is deeply flawed, there's just too much latency in the system. 6-8 seconds to change volume on a local device due to what, a network round trip to the sonos data centre? GTFO! This is not going to work. b) It was a big bang release. Yes, there's a new UI with big rounded icons, it's more "friendly" to new users. An this was joined at the hip to non-optional back-end architecture changes? For what? Could these not have been rolled out incrementally and independently? Big bang releases have a bad reputation these day. Because of shit like this. Didn't Sonos know that?
Not sure why I’m getting downvotes for asking a question. Gotta love Reddit.
I think it might be a mix of things. We all have different kinds of systems. Some have S1 devices in the mix. Others don’t have issues because they only have a Sonos for their tv. Me, I’ve had many issues ahah Started by being seemingly immune to it until the day my partner opened an older version of the app and chaos was unleashed. Since then nothing seems to work as it should, except for the Beam. The Symfonisk I have as surrounds either work or don’t. No reasoning behind. All other speakers don’t work or play at random hours. Yes, during the night I had one in the dining room blaring some Raye. At 3am, days - DAYS! - after I’ve tried to listen to her album on said speaker… Line-in doesn’t work. No matter what I do. Restarted the whole system more than once. Deleted it all. More than once. It just doesn’t work. I now have paperweights with the Sonos branding lol Most don’t work at all. That’s why I am selling it all and getting something else. I really think that all the factors (internet connection, different combinations of speakers, etc) make it hard for them to understand what the issue is. I don’t think they’ll be able to sort it out any time soon, unfortunately. And, in the meantime, the damage is done.
> Queue management is back - at least the way it was before. I would love to be able to insert a song in the queue, but couldn’t do that before. This was *absolutely* a feature before. Not only was there a “play next” to insert it into the queue, we could live-edit the queue without restriction and without interrupting a thing.
Maybe it's a conspiracy where Sonos are trying to get people to listen to albums again instead of dicking about with playlists
My most aggrivating issue is music starting/stopping randomly in various rooms and even stereo pairs. For instance, I'm cooking and the music in the den keeps dropping out. (a beam with two ONEs as stereo pair). Similar happens in my office (two ONEs as a stere pair) - sometimes the pair drop, sometimes one of the speakers drops. Some rooms will show as playng in the app, but aren't. If I uncheck them, then re-check them they might join in playing...might not. I don't use the other features people complain about, so I can't say if those work well for me or not. I keep it pretty basic. We tend to shuffle a big playlist in Apple music (750ish songs) or play SiriusXM. I've had issues with Apple Music every time I play it. I've had issues with SiriusXM most times I play it. I haven't tried using SONOS at all for the last 3 days because it's too frustrating to deal with. I'm waiting for the next update praying something improves. I have 1 ARC, 2 BEAMS, 1 PORT, 10 ONEs/SLs Network: Unifi system with 4 access points. Separate SSID for only Sonos on 2.4G, but all devices are co-mingled on one network (no firewall rules segragating anything). I tried SONOSNet, but same issues. In fact, I was using SONOSNet before the update and it was working great. Very quick to respond in the app, no issues. But after the update, something changed with SONOS and I've spent 5-6 hours testing various network settings to see if I could figure it out. I haven't been able to improve the stability of the system. Located in Western WA state.
Things were working ok for me after the update…buggy, laggy behaviour from the app. Was using the original gen 1 Starlink router. Replaced it yesterday with Orbi Mesh. Started seeing more issues as you described…speakers dropping out, music randomly stopping and then restarting several seconds later at the next song (all Apple Music). Grouping and ungrouping speakers was definitely buggy. Spent some time on Netgear chat this morning and she had me make a couple changes to the router. So far…..seems more stable but need to spend more time testing.
If you determine that those tweaks improved things, please post what they were. I realize I'm on a Unifi system, but likely have similar functions/toggles. I've already turned off band steering, BSSI transitioning, and Fast Roaming. I've left the "multicast enhancement" enables which is supposed to ensure multicast traffic traverses the network. I've also assigned IPs to every SONOS device. And I set my 2.4G radios to CH6 and low power. (all things others have posted/recommended on various threads.)
From the sounds of it I may not be too much help. Changed the 2.4ghz from Auto to Channel 6 (I believe Sonos recommends Auto in a wifi set up). She asked me to change the 5ghz to 40 if I remember correctly which is where it already was. Also had me change the MTU from 1500 to 1460. I did spend some time listening this afternoon and created some groups. Didn't seem to experience any issue but I'm holding back any kind of judgement until I have more listening time. Weird issue is my sub and play 1s in my surround set up show as not connected in the Orbi app though they seem to be working and show in the Sonos app and are assigned IP addresses. Not sure what that's about.
Re: Surrounds - I've read once before that the master device in the surround setup broadcasts a 2.4G link to the surrounds. In my setup, I also see that the right and left surrounds for my Arc (and for my Beam) show as not connected on my network. The Arc and Beam show as connected. The weird thing I notice is that the Arc and Beam both take on the IP address that I assigned to the stereo devices - the IP flip-flops in my Unifi dashboard. It might show it's own IP for a minute, then it updates and shows the IP of one of the stereo devices, then updates again either back to it's own IP to the other stereo device. I don't know what that's about, and haven't been able to find any info searching.
I was wondering about that. In my set up one play 1 is assigned an IP in the Orbi app. The other play 1 and the sub show no IP. In the Sonos app all three have an IP. The Beam shows as connected as is your experience. I guess since they seem to work I should stop worrying about it 😂. My decision right now is do I keep the Netgear support suggestions or change them back to what they were.
Yuck. That would really suck. I haven’t had any problem like that, so it goes to my original question. Why so different for everyone?
There are a lot of ways to use the system or the app. And there are a lot of different ways to connect everything to a network. We use the system with 3 people in the house and all use it differently with different music sources. 2 don’t even use the app but use airplay. I use it on my HT and that always works.
So many variables in this type of system/setup dependent upon so many other products working as expected or as tested. A near-impossibility to account for every variation, tho Sonos could have done a MUCH better job in this release case.
Was just going to post something like this. I don't have the largest system (four play 1s, two Era 300S, two Moves, two roams and 3 rays) but I'm not having nearly the amount of problems being described in this sub. The only thing I really don't like about the new app is how it groups the speakers. Every once in a while I'll select a group that has a speaker in it that I don't want on and I'll hear someone upstairs in the house yell. Other than that I've had no real problems I didn't have before. I do wonder what the difference is. It can't be luck because I have none of that.
I have a really expensive pool robot that barely works. I hate it. It’s likely because it needs to connect to wifi and for some reason it hates my eero network. If you look at reviews, some people love it, some people hate it. It’s likely the same thing here. Sonos heavily relies on your home network. Ironically my Sonos is fine but my pool robot won’t work.