Spence will receive a cash severance of $1,875,000, per SEC filings. He will also get $7,500 per month and serve as a Sonos board advisor until June, and his unvested shares will vest.
If I was this bad at my job, I’d be shitcanned with no compensation. It’s pretty cool how we reward failure at the highest levels.
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.
They sound decent. A bit overpriced honestly by the time you add in the sub and enough speakers to setup a nice 7.1 you can buy something less fidgety and save a lot of money.
Their security is bad. They’re vulnerable to people screwing with them. If you’re on the network, you can ask their webservers to do whatever you want, there’s no auth. Their networking protocol is kind of bad. They need a LOT of ports open to communicate with each other. Their discovery is iffy. If you put one of the speakers on ethernet, they’ll mesh the rest of the speakers and use that one speaker to lower latency. but if that speaker reboots or updates, the rest of the speakers go nuts and dissapear for a while.
They don’t allow bluetooth playback. They don’t always show up for casting from Plex. They keep forgetting my wife’s apple ID. They don’t allow you to use a custom name for the alexa integration. The mic on the beam is so hot, that other alexas on the same floor will always defer to it, it’s very bad at hearing you over it’s own sound.
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.
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.
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.
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’m so confused by some of the stuff in this thread. I still use my sonos stuff and never even noticed the update beyond seeing that the UI changed a little at some point. I know people had some issues but I never stopped being able to do what I wanted with my beam, sub and a couple of satellite speakers in other rooms.
I use streaming services for music when i’m not using it for the TV too. I usually use the streaming apps themselves rather than the sonos app to do anything. I have set some custom EQ stuff with their app, but that’s understandable.
I don’t think they are anything special and they are very expensive things for what they do, but my problems are very few and far between. Every now and then my beam doesn’t get commands from HDMI via my TV… and the TV is always the issue (it’s old.) That’s really it. I’m not in love with the stuff and when it’s time to replace it i’ll look at what else is out there, but I don’t hate it either.
Right when S2 came out, If you needed to go in and screw with anything they would force you off of S1 into S2.
Right when the app released it was pretty bad. They broke the integrations. Speakers were having a lot of trouble being added. My SL ones were just appear and disappear randomly for a bit. It took them like a month to sort it out.
But 99% of my use cases are audio over ARC, and playing music in one kid’s room every night. The arc never stopped working for me on my beam 2.
When the sl-one dropped off I just used an echo for about a week. Plex was broken for two separate 1 weeks bands during which I also just used the echo.
I think it didn’t bother me all that much because I’m already presenting to home automation, and any of my cloud immigrations just explode every time a company farts.
I’d love some speakers that allow streaming without having to be cloud-controlled. I’m afraid I’d have to make them myself.
Same
The main thing I noticed that the “advanced” stuff disappeared, I can’t debug what signal my Arc is receiving any more.
On the other hand I’m not going to buy any more Sonos stuff either and if I find a valid replacement (Atmos, wireless, minimal app involvement) I’ll switch.
I believe many folks were using the other features that go beyond streaming… E g. Setting up alarms, streaming music from their locally hosted servers, etc. I believe all that went away with the new app. I never noticed any issues personally, since I just steam/cast.
Same, I’ve been happy with my two play 1s for over a decade. But my secret is not updating, and not using the app (neither phone nor windows), I use Home Assistant (Python) and Noson. My other secret is not adding more Sonos speakers, because I believe you need to use the official phone app for grouping or updates.
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.
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 ought to be licensing their protocol as a standard for multiroom audio to compete with airplay. Seems obvious to license it to Denon, Yamaha, etc. I’m using Yamaha MusicCast but if I were buying today I’d standardize on either Airplay 2 or Spotify Connect instead. IMO Sonos is a dead man walking.
Sonos actually uses AirPlay as well. Frankly, they lose when it comes to multiroom audio vs that interface, and they need to make their money off of selling speakers (compatible with AirPlay and other services). Their problem is they wanted to be a clearing house of users listening habits, where you’d need to use the app for them to track that (where you sign up / in with your services); that’s asinine, and they just need to be a speaker company.
That’s so corporate. Everyone’s big idea boils down to being a service instead of a seller (because that’s theoretically more profitable), but it sucks.
Maybe. I’d say it’s more corporate for Sonos to try to develop yet another closed wireless audio sync protocol just to force users to sign in through their app so they can data scrape you. In the absence of a true open wireless sync protocol (maybe there is one and I’m unaware, in which case I’d like to be educated!) I’d rather them use a more widely adopted protocol than roll their own.
Edit: I think maybe I misunderstood the comment I replied to and they were agreeing with this statement in general.
