Why has my Sonos stopped working?
QAs a long-time reader of your informative magazine, I wonder if you might have a view on the following? Sonos in its wisdom has suddenly stopped me from playing music stored on my ipad. Over time I have built up quite a collection on the ipad and this is the only music I play. Following the short notice of change I stopped updating the ipad, but the change took place irrespective of my action. This must’ve caused inconvenience to others as well as me. Is there any way to fix this?
AYou didn’t say which Sonos speaker you own but from your description of the problem we’re confident it’s the company’s original Play:1 device, released in 2013. This is a fine little speaker that connects to smart devices on the same network, via your router’s Wi-fi.
However, due to changes in Apple’s IOS and ipados operating systems – and specifically the way later iphones and ipads manage Wi-fi connectivity when the screen is locked – playback via the particular Wi-fi protocol used by the Sonos app and hardware meant that the system became unreliable.
In theory at least, one fix would’ve been for users to simply prevent their devices from locking automatically when playing music to the Play:1, but Sonos took the decision instead to disable this particular playback method.
There are other ways to pipe music to your Play:1 – including use of a streaming service such as Spotify, uploading your tracks to the Apple Music service, or via a PC, Mac or Android device over Wi-fi – but the particular way you play music is no longer supported.
You can read the company’s explanation and proposed alternative solutions at www.snipca.com/32779. The bottom line is that, as the Play:1 doesn’t support Bluetooth and lacks a good old-fashioned 3.5mm jack input, there’s now simply no way to play music directly from your ipad to the speaker.
You asked us if we had a view, and we’re happy to share our thoughts. While it was Apple that changed the way that IOS and ipados worked, we don’t think there was a compelling reason for Sonos to kill this particular feature in its app. Rather, the firm could’ve warned users about the problems they might face if they continued using it, and allowed people to continue with this understanding.