Roon & Sonos Move

Is anyone using Roon with a Sonos Move? I wanted a battery-powered speaker to take onto my fairly large balcony when I’m having parties without having to pair a phone or iPad to a simpler Bluetooth speaker. Sonus Move looks as if it will not only do this but would normally live in my sitting room where I currently have a Google Home device which, with its 2-mic array, doesn’t hear me too well so the Sonus with its 4-mic array might even improve or even fix that issue as well. It’s looking like the perfect solution for me but I do have 1 question (which isn’t a show-stopper - just curious)…

Will using any or all of the controls on the Sonus Move device itself (play/pause, volume up/down and skip forward/back) be detected and acted on correctly by the Roon Core or is it like some other devices, e.g. my KEF LS50w, where some stuff (volume up/down/mute) works but pressing pause (for instance) causes a Roon error (“Roon has lost control of the output device”)?

I haven’t heard anything either way about whether the Sonos Move specifically works with Roon. I would expect that it should work like any other Sonos speaker, but we don’t have one and haven’t specifically tested it. If it doesn’t work we’ll consider that a bug with Roon.

The LS50w behavior is what you will get here. It’s also what other Sonos hardware does.

Thanks Ben. I’d seen you contributing on a quite old thread on Sonos where you said that you were the developer responsible for most of the Sonos integration so great to see you still here to give such informed input.

Just to be clear on the LS50w comparison, does that mean that the on-device volume up/down buttons should work (assuming the Sonos Move behaves similarly to the Sonos devices that you have tested in-house) but the track control buttons/gestures (play/pause/skips) won’t? In a party situation that’s good enough for me, tweaking the volume is the most common activity so it’s only volume up/down that I really care about because it would be nice not to have to pull out a Roon remote device to do that.

Yes. That’s exactly what I would expect. The “Pause” button kindof works, in that it’ll make the music stop by causing Roon to display that lost control error. That’s also clearly not ideal, but sometimes just having a button to make the sound go away is convenient.

If the volume controls don’t work I would consider that a potential Roon issue as well, please let the support guys know and they’ll try to help.

Thanks. Sounds like this will be a good way for me to go. And that’s a good observation re pause/Roon-lost-control. If the intention is to stop the music then pressing the pause button will still do that albeit with an error message also coming up on the remote. It just means that restarting (in-pausing) needs to be done via Roon Remote but that’s OK.

Hey Ben. Just FYI I got my Sonos Move and it’s working perfectly with Roon. Roon saw 2 devices in Settings/Audio, one for Airplay streaming and the other for Sonos streaming so I only enabled the Sonos streaming one as a zone for Roon to see. I assume that was the correct (highest quality) choice. Please let me know if I would have been better going with airplay.

By the way, it doesn’t work 100% as expected, or maybe I should say it doesn’t not work (fail) as expected. When I press the pause/play button on the speaker when music is playing I don’t get the “Roon lost control of the device” error I was expecting (because that’s what happens with my KEF50w speakers). What it actually does is a skip-forward-a-track operation. Interesting and possibly quite useful since when I’m letting Roon Radio curate a party playlist for me it’ll be really good to have a skip-to-next-track capability on the speaker buttons for times when Roon Radio comes up with any badly received track choices.

Same here! I just searched up this thread when checking if others had the same “issue”. When pushing pause on the Sonos Move it skips to the next song. I’m fine with it as I mostly use my phone as remote, but it’s driving my wife mad when she wants to turn of the music! :grin:

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I have a Move and it was working great with Roon (I’m away from it at the moment).

I would love the skip track function to be retained. I think the “turn off the music” function can be met by holding the volume down button. Not necessarily obvious but workable. Having a skip track function would be great.

Is anyone able to add the Sonos Move to a zone? My Sonos has been delivered yesterday and has been connected to Roon easily, but I am not able to add the speaker to a Zone (it should bring the sound into the kitchen). Roon says the speaker is connected via Sonos-Steaming. Newest firmware is installed.

Late reply, I am able to, plays up sometimes though.