Sonos dropouts (Roon lost control)

I don’t think it is a clear cut answer by way of the number of Sonos speakers. I think it has a lot to do with the network load overall and the strength of connection for individual speakers. I have a few wired Connects and several wireless speakers (1’s, 3’s, and new 5).

I moved my traditional network to mesh (eeros) and things got a lot better in terms of dropouts, almost going away. Then it seems with the last Roon release things have gotten worse again. I can usually run 4-5 speakers in a group without issue (as mentioned not hitting too many skip songs or fast forwarding).

Not related: the Sonos hard buttons don’t work other than volume. You can’t use them to skip a song. If you stop streaming you can’t restart the Roon stream. That would be nice if they worked.

rob.

It looks like your Line In stream is getting Compressed by Sonos. Roon would not do that, so maybe that is a difference?

Perhaps. Sadly, sonos just refuses to play any 24bit flac without having a panic attack - so i just turned compression on globally.

Heres my sonos matrix at http://192.168.2.112:1400/support/review
I think Michael Faraday built this house…

Are those messages, with “Roon.flac” with the -nosonosflac flag set?

If so, do you also happen to have a ZP80 or ZP100 player in the group?

I’m attempting to understand how you have a file name ending in .flac despite nominally having Roon set to send an uncompressed .wav file.

This would have to be an option somewhere, because the normal product assumption when people use Roon is that they’re playing to only and exactly the outputs selected in the Roon app. Given that it needs to be an option, we can’t really afford the UI or software complexity it would add. I would much prefer to figure out how to fix the grouping inside Roon.

Can you upload your Roon logs somewhere I can get them? Log file instructions are here: https://kb.roonlabs.com/Logs

Roon.flac is the default track name for anything that is streaming to Sonos wirelessly. I assume it’s just a static filename that’s generated during the file hand-off to Sonos.
That includes with and without the -nosonosflac switch. As you can see, I’m playing a 242kbps MP3 encoded file, but Roon.flac is what appears on Sonos.

I don’t know the Sonos internals well enough to know, but I assume the compression, that is enabled via Sonos, applies to all transports regardless of origin.

And in regard to your network load theory, that makes sense on the surface. But if it were the case, then you would expect Sonos to have the same issues as Roon. And the line-in setup should be just as flaky. None of that is true, however.

I’m leaning towards the idea that this is somehow related with the way in which Roon talks to the Sonos zones and they aren’t performing that action correctly. Which is why I suggested a beta branch where Roon doesn’t manipulate the Sonos zone configuration and instead just queues to a specific zone speaker (honoring whatever setup already exists on that controller). My guess is that you would see immediate improvement that is similar if not identical to the native Sonos playback.

I am simply reading the screenshot you posted – the dropdown where you selected Compression instead of Auto explicitly is for Line in.

I think we might be saying related things. Roon has no choice but to use the Sonos provided API. I am confident they are using the API correctly. I think Sonos does things differently internally to their system of speakers, some “secret sauce” to optimize. Everything is smoother using the Sonos app for Sonos speakers vs Roon, but I don’t know if there is anything Roon can do. When I was having more significant problems with Roon and Sonos I opened tickets, sent logs, and had Roon monitor my system. I think Roon continues to tweak their Sonos code, but my issues were mostly solved through network changes (again, Roon needs more network than native Sonos to be problem-free in my experience).

Good luck and stick with it!

I’ve read, don’t remember where, that Sonos plans to make their hardware more accessible. Whether that means improved API, more 3rd party support or whatever that may be. So perhaps we will all see some improvements this year.

A post was split to a new topic: Have to reboot Sonos Connect - “Roon lost control…”

Ben, don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure. Although I’ve been using Roon for since November, I only recently started streaming to my five Sonos endpoints, and have experienced the “lost control” stuff mentioned elsewhere in this thread.

I have two wired CONNECTs, two wired AMPs, and one wireless Speaker Five.

Is your above December quote still the current state of affairs? Is it fair to say the Roon/Sonos link has fatal flaws? Are there any workarounds (I know about the “replace your equipment” workaround :slight_smile: )

If I have to abandon the Sonos infrastructure, has anyone got a suggestion about how to continue to use the Sonos speakers?

This depends a lot on what your problems look like exactly. I think there are still 2-3 different classes of dropouts with Roon and Sonos hardware, although it’s somewhat difficult to be sure. The big test is, if you play a single long FLAC file from the same machine the Roon Core is installed on using the Sonos app, do you have still have dropouts? “Long file” in this context means at least 1-2 hours long.

If yes, the problem is somewhere outside Roon. If no, then the problem is inside Roon, and we might be able to find a fix. I can’t comment on when that fix might happen or be public.

No long FLACs, just playing some 3-4 minute tunes for my granddaughter (from TIDAL), and “lost control” early in the process.

Please provide some troubleshooting steps. Sonos covers 85% of the house. I need it to work if possible. Thx.

Hi, would it be possible to describe these 2-3 class so that perhaps we can reconfigure things on our end to avoid?

The goal right now is to find out which of these two cases we are in:

  1. There is some problem triggered by how Roon interacts with the Sonos hardware, in the sense of what commands we send or similar
  2. There is some problem triggered by the fact that Roon streams FLAC files to the Sonos hardware from the machine the core is on, regardless of the actual source of the music

We are going to try to do this by simulating Roon’s general behavior without actually using any Roon software. I’ll send you a PM with a link to a FLAC file, here are steps to try:

  1. Download the file to the same machine that your Roon core runs on.
  2. Turn off Roon, at least the Roon core
  3. Using just the official Sonos app, play the FLAC file from step 1 to the Sonos speakers that you are having trouble with

If that plays to the end without dropping, then the problem you are experiencing is a Roon problem, and hopefully we can improve it. If not, then the problem is fundamental to streaming files from your Roon core system, and maybe there is a network problem that you can fix. It might be possible to go to Sonos support with “I can’t play this FLAC file from my computer”

I am aware of basically these types of problems:

  1. “transport: lost control of endpoint” type messages near the start of playback when adding multiple zones to a group. I believe this occurs primarily under less-than-optimal network conditions.
  2. “transport: lost control of endpoint” type messages near the start of playback when playing to a single zone and pressing the ‘next’ button
  3. network problems exposed by the way Roon streams from a local machine instead of directly from a cloud service

I can’t swear to these being the only problems, and we haven’t been able to reproduce any of them reliably in house. The best I can recommend as far as reconfiguring to avoid them is just generic network quality advice, trying to run ethernet cables to everything and stuff like that.

Hi, in terms of above, my music library for my Sonos system is actually the same as what I use for Roon, meaning they are the same files residing on the machine running Roon Core. Does that imply this is a Roon issue?

My issue of Transport: Lost Control of Audio Device occurs when playing to both wired and wireless Sonos units. To make sure I avoid the potential of bridge loops, I have disabled wifi on my Sonos devices which are hardwired. (I do this out of caution since my switch only supports Rapid STP and not regular STP and I was told Sonos does not support Rapid STP, and my switch does not support regular STP; only Rapid STP).

Thank you

BEN, ran the Coltrane thing (BTW, gets the prize for most notes in a 3-minute piece) on Sonos, reading from my ROCK library. Just on one zone with no groups. Everything was fine. More experiments.

Now, ran Sonos from iPhone X to Den Sonos – same setup that was failing in Roon. No problems.

Now running Roon, all five Sonos without dropouts…yet. So, just letting it run through a playlist now…

I’ve been stressing the Roon setup now: switch to TIDAL; switch between sample rates; dropped/added Sonos rooms while playing, etc. No disruptions yet.

@ben thanks for your continued work on this. Can the developers change the message so that when it says “lost control of endpoint” that it gives the NAME of the endpoint? That would be really helpful. It seems like some more specific diagnostics to a log file would help narrow down the scenarios.

Hi All
I was having a lot of drop-outs Roon to Sonos, but I just upgraded my wifi to a mesh system with Google wifi,and all my problems have disappeared. I was using a traditional router and had different zones because my house has stone wallls, so I think the problem was wifi interference. Now my wifi experience seems faster every where. I highly recommend a mesh router.

I use SonosNet and did not have any problem with dropouts even if I run multiple zones at the same time and download something from SonosNet using my mobile devices.
I have at least one Sonos device in every room of my apartment. My Playbar in the living room is connected via 1GBit fiber optic cable directly to my router.
The WLAN of my router is disabled.

I use SonosNet and regular wifi as a test without any issues as long as it’s played directly through Sonos, but using Sonos with Roon causes multiple dropouts using both wireless methods.