Controling Sonos is unreliable and limited

Peter Elvidge

5 years ago
updated 5 years ago
Under review

Hi, I have been trying to get reliable control of sonos from bos for a while. Volume and play / pause / stop / skip etc. seem to consistently work well. However - selecting playlists sometimes works sometimes does not - and I cant figure out any pattern. Often I call PlayPlaylist(playlistName) and it just clears whats in the current queue - I call exactly the same command again and it loads the playlist and plays. Also finding that I can put a radio station in favourites - I can call it via the pre-built bOS control .. but not via PlayFavourite(favouriteName). .. I have not successfully called any radio stations via URI either.. The fact that the simple controls like volume and play work so reliably suggests no connectivity issues etc. short of installing wireshark on the grinder is there any way to see a log from bOS server to see whats happening between it and sonos and which side is messing up? Finally.. in the inbuilt bOS sonos control you can list the playlists & favourites .. how can I access these from a value to work with them programatically?

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Jürgen Jürgenson

5 years ago

I just did some test with my Sonos playlists - Only problem i had with it was the playlist i made inside Sonos that had all my old music from the NAS in one playlist(maybe some network error as im not at home right now, it used to work so ill check it later). All other playlists worked. Also the favorites worked like they should.

The URL radio playlist is only used when the scheduler starts it from bOS. I've made all other playlists and favorites inside Sonos app. Scheduler is made inside bOS so it would play some radios to my cat, he hasn't complained yet :)

This scheduler Start the radio station program and sets the volume to 14 and un-mutes it.

This is the radios URL it runs.

Mainly i use the playlists and choose my favorites that ive made inside the Sonos app, because its easy, finding working links to radios was too time consuming so i did only few like this. Also if the radio is down it wont play anything - i had this problem with some of them like Kool London radio that sometimes went offline - so best if you check that the radio you are trying to play is working.
Running on bOS 4.8.5

Edit: It now loaded the full playlist too. Not sure why it didnt load it the first two-three times i tried it.

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ComfortClick Support

5 years ago
Under review

Hello,

we did some re-testing after this report and weren't able to recreate these issues exactly, settings that were mentioned work ok here on multiple devices and scenarios.

Queue on the playlists do seem to have some hick ups here and there and does sometimes get stuck, we are working on improving this in our next release.

Uri station change works normally with all the radio stations listed, we'd suggest checking the uri used, if it's correct and correctly added into bos.

Favourite stations work normally as well, when new station is added in SONOS app, double check if the names are exaclty right in bOS (upper and lower cases) it might not get refreshed immediately, so we suggest, refreshing the favourites list in the client application (if a new list is created in the SONOS app).

Best regards.

Thanks both for excellent replies! I have been testing more and I have found that I get materially better reliability when I use the sonos stop command before loading a new playlist. And radio stations for sure work better when saved in sonos as a favorite and then call the favourite. When a playlist fails to play, on closer inspection of sonos you can see the old one has gone, but the new one is not loaded, trying exactly the same command again can often work. I have also found that if you take a bit more time between attempts its more likely to work.. I also noted that one of the playlists I had been trying was actually a spotify playlist - I guess we need to call these a different way?