Hi!
I just started using Plex via my Sonos system, and I noticed that I cannot see any activity in plex. Music activity is shown if playback is done via the Plex app on both Android and iOS. The same goes for web-playback.
Is this Sonos-related? Or, can activity monitoring be added for Sonos as well?
Following up from a comment on the blog, you asked that I discuss my concerns about the way Plex integrates with Sonos in the context of these typical concerns:
(A) the current Plex-Sonos service is broken for me, and it seems like the "cloud" service provider might be responsible
(B) the current Plex-Sonos service feels slow, and it seems like the "cloud" service provider might be responsible
(C) from a privacy perspective, I don't want my music library information to go through Plex
(D) I have a Sonos in a location that has no Internet access, and I want Plex-Sonos to work there
I don't have any issue with (A) and (B). I'd say (C) is a minor concern, though like most members of western civilization in the 21st century, I've long given up on the idea that I actually have any privacy. It mostly has to do with (D), and (E): complexity, and necessity.
Bear in mind I have long, long history with streaming music. I was one of the first owners of a Squeezebox back in 1995. All I have ever wanted out of Sonos is to be as good as that was, 20 years ago. I only got a Sonos a couple years ago because it because too much effort to keep the Squeezebox stuff going -- from both a hardware and software perspective -- and there was no support for modern streaming services (other than Spotify). Generally I have been happy with that decision, but I miss many things about my old setup. The basic service and features was actually much better than what I have now - in terms of plugin support, flexibility, quality, apps, and even remote access.
So I have to think about this holisitcally. If my internet service is down, I can't play my music. If you (Plex) decide to end your partnership with Sonos, I can't play my music. If you go out of business, I can't play my music. If your cloud service is temporarily down, I can't play my music.
At the end of the day, the necessity to interact with a cloud service to just play music using a client that can work without internet access (Sonos), from a server that can work without Internet access (Plex), in a closed network, seems silly and adds a significant point of failure with many dependencies. Sure, most of the time everything will just work, but there will definitely be times it does not, and I expect it will be when I'm having a dinner party and it'll be really annoying.
Is this going to be a dealbreaker for me? Well I already have a lifetime Plex pass so, obviously not, I'm glad for the service. If you can improve it to be a lot better than Subsonic is now, e.g. by adding Genre support, better scanning (e.g. show the letter while scrolling), and in my fantasy world, add some Logitech Media Server-like features such as plugins for creating playlists dynamically, then I'll most likely switch to Plex as my primary private library server. Though I definitely won't uninstall Subsonic from my computer so I have a backup plan. It's just a bit disappointing to have something that ought to be nice and clean have a whole bunch of external dependencies.
Just got my Plex / Sonos setup working (had to resolve some NAT issues). First album I went to play was a FLAC 96k/24 bit album. The Sonos app threw an error at me telling me it didn't know how to play 96000 hz sample rate. It seems Plex should know to transcode this format on behalf of Sonos, but it didn't. I'm running 1.0.3.2461 on Ubuntu Linux. Are there any settings I need to adjust to let the transcoding work? Or have I found a bug?
Hello everyone..
I have Plex loaded up with about 4TB of Audio and Hi Rez Audio .. I can access the music on Plex.. Now that it supports Sonos.. I have enabled the beta.... I have enabled Remote access and Manually set the port ..
I open up Plex via Sonos..
I see the libraies
I see the Artist
I select the CD
---> then I get a "unable to connect to Plex Media Server " error .. I refresh the manual port.. still no go .. could it be a settings in the streaming setting that I need to enable or disable ?.. Im not to familiar what should be selected or not .. sorry ..
Anyone else experience this issue ?
thanks in advance
I am running a dedicated server (QNAP) with my PLEX server on a Win 10 machine. Running a single network drive with audio in it. Plex has finished loading all data and Sonos Win 10 Desktop control shows it but when I select a song or album to play I get a popup error "Unable to play xxxxx - unable to connect to Plex".
I have both FLAC and MP3 files on the drive and nothing works. There is also no album covers showing either.
And it might be important, but I am not running a standard flavor of Sonos (controllers or unit SW).
Was just wondering - when should we expect updates? Seems like there hasn't been much feedback from the devs here since the initial release, nor have there been any updates since the initial release. Usually deploying a beta is an interactive & incremental process .. should we expect anything or are we just waiting for a final release at some point?
System;
I have had Sonos for almost 11 years and passed the 65k track limit about 6 years ago. The capability to access all my ~120+k tracks made the Plex/Sonos beta worth trying.
All my music files are stored in FLAC format. The tracks for each album are stored together in ~8,600 album folders named "Artist Name - Album Name" with an album art jpg file in each folder of 950 x 950 pixel resolution.
I downloaded the Plex Media Server software onto my Synology DS1515+ NAS with 32GB memory. The software loaded without any problem. I started the indexing process on my music library. I have painstakingly input/edited my tags to eliminate errors and keep a consistent naming format so i opted to use my tag values. The Plex indexing process took 20 days to complete.
Observations;
Great to see all my music in one place at one time!
Plex doesn't recognize the "folder.jpg" file in each album folder like Sonos does. Sonos displays the album art for each track in the album without having to have any artwork inside the track files. It would be nice if Plex could do the same thing but I could live with Plex embedding a copy of the "folder.jpg" file into each track during the indexing process.
There doesn't seem to be a way to jump to a letter like the Sonos controller can with the Music Library. The Sonos controller displays the alphabet along the right side of the window with "A" at the top and "Z" at the bottom. You can click on any of those letters and the display immediately jumps to that letter. Example - The default displayed list starts at "A." If you want to browse for something starting with the letter "P" you click on the letter "P" along the right side of the window and the list immediately displays values starting with "P". On controller devices with keyboards, you can type the letter on the keyboard and the list immediately jumps to that value.
There doesn't seem to be a way to see all the tracks by an artist in one list. Sonos always displays "All" in addition to the individual albums by an artist. Clicking on "All" returns a list of all tracks from all albums by that artist in one alphabetically ordered list.
The responsiveness of the index being on my NAS is not as fast as the index being on the Sonos zoneplayers. Is there a way to put the complete Plex index into memory on my NAS so the response becomes faster?
This seems to be an issue with some Plex clients generally (I noticed other posts about the Android client related to this), so not sure if this is Plex server or Sonos client issue.
Either way, when playing tracks that have an Album Artist tag, in addition to an Artist tag, the Album Artist gets shown in the Sonos client.
This is definitely undesirable, since you will always see "Various Artists" or whatever in such situations. I think you'd always want to see Artist when a track is playing.
Is it possible to play Plex media off Sonos app without the remote access?
I would like to play the media from within my home and I prefer not to enable the remote access for this.
Thanks
I have added my plex.tv account to Sonos and it's playing back now (I had a pfSense / UPnP issue but resolved now - statically NAT it!).
Playback seems to be fine and reliable, only issue I see now is that the activity is not showing in the server's status page.
.. nor in my Plexpy but I guess that's related to Plex server not displaying the session?
As none of my Sonos playback is getting recorded/recognised in PMS, the discover playlists are not showing any recent plays, nor (I assume) are they getting used in the other automatic lists in the discover section :(
I see same behaviour in 1.0.3.2461, 1.1.1.2675 and 1.1.2.2680
How to get it to?
Would love the ability to add the categories in "Discover", such as "Recently Played" and "Recently Added" to the Sonos Favorites menu.
Loving the integration otherwise!
Cheers
Just installed PLEX, everything works except connection to SONOS. I get an error message "unable to play, can not connect to PLEX" when I try to play music from my SONOS system. PLEX transfered my music list, but no artwork or music.
After an update to the latest songs firmware/software, I can still browse my flex music library, but when I try to play a song, I get the message that songs can not connect to PLEX.
both are on the same netwerk, and my flex is even accessible outside my netwerk. anybody else with this problem?
or am I missing a setting.
cheers
When you select "BY ALBUM" view, it sorts by Artist, then by Album Title. So you will never have all of the same Album titles together. I am using Plex to also play my Audiobook collection (over 650 titles) and it is sorted in directories with multiple artists but it has an Unique title that I would like to be able to sort on.
Is this possible? Or is this just the way Sonos does things?
When I try to play WMA files in plex/sonos I get the error - These songs are not available for streaming from plex. The songs will play thru the plex player, sonos without plex and mediaplayer. Both plex and sonos say they support wma files.
Anyone have an idea on why plex/sonos together are not working with WMA files?
Hi everybody,
Am using a Meraki MX64W for my network and can't get the Sonos beta to work.
What I did (so far) is to manually specify port 32400 on the Plex server (DS-216 II) and did a port forward to 32400 on the Meraki (which does not support UpNP).
I'm at the stage where I get this message from the Plex server:
Fully accessible outside your network
You can access this server from signed-in Plex apps or in a browser at https://plex.tv/web.
But the Sonos app can't navigate the Plex server.
..help?
Whilst setting up the Plex service from the Sonos iOS Controller app I kept getting error messages after clicking the 'Existing Account' link (on the setup screen where you choose if you have a new or existing Plex account). Instead of showing the screen with the Plex pairing pin I saw a blank screen, then an error message after a timeout.
After a bit of trial and error I fixed the problem by disabling the iOS ad blocker Safari extension I'm running then restarting the Sonos Controller app and re-attempting the service setup process. Perhaps some hint could be added to the setup screens suggesting to the user to temporarily disable any ad blockers if the setup fails?
just a few comments on my first impression. please take it not as ungreatfull but as positive criticism.
browsing feels very sluggish and slow. i get many server unreachable errors. especially if browsing down to the track level
randomly the library level disappears. clicking on plex goes directly to one of my three music librarys instead to the library selection. cu
please add support for the getScrollIndices call. it will allow to use letter shortcut keys to jump directly to the items starting with this letter
please revisit your scrolling implementation. for example if the user scrolls very fast to line 200 of a list plex should directly return the data for line 200+ and skip all lines before. this will speed up browsing immensely.
i habe lots of
Jul 20, 2016 22:29:08.821 [0xf2111b40] ERROR - CERT: Error in TLS handshake: short read
Jul 20, 2016 22:35:44.558 [0xe288fb40] ERROR - [PlexRelay] kex protocol error: type 7 seq 11
Jul 20, 2016 22:35:44.686 [0xea735b40] INFO - [PlexRelay] Allocated port 51458 for remote forward to localhost:32401
Jul 20, 2016 22:46:16.157 [0xf0fffb40] ERROR - JobManager: child process killed by signal: 9 (Killed)
errors on my ds 1813+. maybe this is one of the reasons for the sluggish performance
again: please don't get me wrong. i just want the implementation to be as good as possible so that plex can really shine with this. it is a really great feature that deserves a great working implementation. and i know it can be done as i did id myself. at least as a proof of concept.
Hi all,
A friend of mine has his Plex server running on a QNAP which is located on his local network, with some port forwarding on his home router so that it can be accessed from outside also. I have my own Plex server running on a Windows server machine in a datacentre so is internet-facing. I have a Plex Pass, however my friend does not.
The issue we're facing is that my friend is unable to play music through Sonos from his own Plex server (hosted on the QNAP), but he is able to play music from my Plex server. Has anyone else experienced any issues similar? I'm thinking that it's either something to do with a reduced support for QNAP, or due to lack of Plex Pass on my friends account (less likely though I would say), or perhaps another reason which I may have overlooked.
I understand that Sonos is currently in Beta and issues may happen, just wondered if anyone might have any idea on what a fix may be, if any?
Thanks in advance!
Regards,
Alex.
From the Sonos iOS app, playing individual tracks works, they are transcoded and play. Selecting "Complete Album" however does not tell the Plex Server to transcode and it sends the native audio files to Sonos which it cannot play as they are in the wrong format.