4w ago

Sonos CEO behind disastrous app exits with $1.9 million severance

arstechnica.com Sonos CEO behind disastrous app exits with $1.9 million severance

Frustrated users think Spence’s removal is “well deserved.”…

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.

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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.
- 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.
  
  Sonos is the apple of speakers: great hardware, but overpriced and a walled garden.
- 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.
  
  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 wasn't able to get anything Google to work with Sonos. I originally had Spotify but cancelled when I couldn't afford a bunch of subscriptions, and switched to my local stores music - which Google also refused to cast easily.
  
  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.
  
  I am using the same network - that’s no problem
  I have to ask the stupid question but are they in pause? What if you hit the button on top?
  
  When I select the speaker in Music Assistant and play a song, the player shows up with all of the details but it's just paused.
  When I press the play button in MA, nothing happens. Not even an error.
  If I press play on the speaker, the last song that was playing before I selected a song in MA starts playing. The player will show my selected track as playing but it's the previous song coming out of the speaker. I can pause the song from MA but I cannot resume. If I resume it from the speaker, the MA player updates to the song that was previously playing and then I cannot control the speaker from MA.
  
  That makes it useless. I hope you figure it out
  
  Have a look at mDNS. It's very often the issue here.
- 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.
  
  No I didn’t actually.
  I’ve never bothered with the app.
  I just use airplay and let HomeKit handle it and have had absolutely 0 issues with it.
  My appleTV discovered it and provided it to HomeKit and I was done.
- Are the speakers themselves good though?
  
  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.
  
  Having other people on the network mess with them sounds kinda fun, but I think I'll probably skip on account of all the other issues.
- I’ll have to try Music Assistant - I use HA and the Spotify app

71 comments