Sonos & Amazon echo: So sick of total unreliability

I’m nearly over ST. I’ve invested so much including 25 lighting circuits worth of electrician fees and plenty of motion sensors and other ‘things’ and I’ve tried hard to show my family the cool things it can do.

Right now, all the Sonos automation just stops working after x days of working fine and Echo just won’t find devices even though it worked well for days and I didn’t tinker. Both just break after time passes.

Is this something we all just live with? I appreciate Sonos is in beta with ST and I know tech breaks, I’m totally used to it as I have an IT background. I’m just sick of it.

Right now if someone could fix my system I’d happily pay them, but no local integrators will touch it. I guess this is why?

Frustrated with ST.

That is a great idea! How did you find a local integrator that knows SmartThings systems and z-wave, ZigBee?

That’s why this is called the “bleeding edge” lol
Remember that you’re not driving a Model T; progress is often slow, and comes with many frustrations.

Try to keep in mind that you’ve had many successes! The frustration with Sonos and Echo will either be resolved within itself, or some other inventor will learn lessons from it and the next generation of such devices and integrations will be better.

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I have personally stopped using ST to control my Sonos players, as their crude API’s are totally unreliable and very disruptive to the Sonos party mode groupings, existing playlists, volume levels, current play mode, etc.

Sonos players are easily accessible on one’s local home network using well documented uPnP commands, but apparently ST engineering believes that is Beta for them?

I have integrated my Sonos players using a Raspberry Pi server and customized Python coding. When a monitored ST event fires, I can have the TTS from the Raspberry Pi snapshot the current players settings, play the message, and restore the player…

Someday, I expect that Sonos and SmartThings will get their act together.

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The Alexa Echo-Sonos integration is really solid. Advanced Sonos Commands for Alexa/Echo (choose playlists/radio, control volume, skip songs, etc.)

Hi @benflux, If you don’t need sonos group, you can use generic media renderer, it allows any dlna speaker to be controlled, it has some fixes , you can try , but you need to uninstall your sonos devices