Where to Start Fixing?

[dcorsus]

As usual, the glitch is always something I would have never imagined. Looking around for hogs, I found that Windows File Explorer was using massive amounts of memory - never seen that before. So I did some disk cleanup and repair stuff - no improvement. Then I noticed that I had a USB drive that I left plugged in after transferring some files. I unplugged that, and poof, memory went away, and the Sonos plugin seems to be working much better. I still have some things to fine tune, but the complete failures seem to have stopped. Hopefully that was it.

Well that is a weird one. Still working on the speaker client mysterious disconnect (protection), but I think I fixed the cause , now was trying to add more recovery but have run into some issues.

Have never seen a problem where a player showed grouped (and isn't) and therefore has his control panes disabled. Can't say I've ever heard anyone complain about something similar. If it happens again, refresh the web page (maybe you did that) to make sure an update wasn't missed (there is JavaScript code on the web client). The almost 100% reason when devices are not updating has to do with the firewall under Windows not allowing autonomous events to come through. Also check that the players still show on-line in the player table, that we didn't lose them due to some reason.

[Mark S.]

Have never seen a problem where a player showed grouped (and isn't) and therefore has his control panes disabled. Can't say I've ever heard anyone complain about something similar. If it happens again, refresh the web page (maybe you did that) to make sure an update wasn't missed (there is JavaScript code on the web client). The almost 100% reason when devices are not updating has to do with the firewall under Windows not allowing autonomous events to come through. Also check that the players still show on-line in the player table, that we didn't lose them due to some reason.

I've been trying to duplicate it, but cannot. Not sure what I was doing the last time it happened, but I did refresh a lot, and all players have been fine. Now the only time the web player shows disabled is when it is grouped with another player as master. But of course, Playlists and Songs are still not working.

The frustrating part of troubleshooting is that my issues seem to happen intermittently. In my simple mind, that usually suggests a PC problem. Hopefully that memory fix was the key. I've been testing events and all seem OK so far. The only thing that still doesn't work yet is my torture test speaking event, but I would never do anything like that anyway.

I am happy to test any new betas if you need that.

[Mark S.]

Sadly, announcements stopped announcing again. Maybe it has something to do with the queue because I've started seeing errors like the ones in the attached hslogerrors.

I just ran the same test event I've been running above in this thread (Drive Up) - it did not announce, but also did not throw the above error - Debug5 attached. CPU and memory look fine. All speakers are online. Oddly, I can get Sonos to manually play announcements stuck in the queue, but HS announcements launched directly from an event won't play.

Now I just restarted the plugin, and everything seems to be working again. Any evidence in these files that the plugin is getting hung up on something?

[dcorsus]

Hmm, not sure where my posting of yesterday went, but I posted a new beta that fixes the "wait for announcement to end", the concurrent use of an announcement group via a speak action and an HS device action, fixed an issue w Speakclients getting lost and updated the grouping function on the player control page to be more in line with the Sonos APP (didn't say 100% in line!). The 2 log files are not telling me much , so suggest you upgrade first

[brientim]

Hmm, not sure where my posting of yesterday went, but I posted a new beta that fixes the "wait for announcement to end", the concurrent use of an announcement group via a speak action and an HS device action, fixed an issue w Speakclients getting lost and updated the grouping function on the player control page to be more in line with the Sonos APP (didn't say 100% in line!). The 2 log files are not telling me much , so suggest you upgrade first

HST had to do a restore from backup after an issue encountered with their forum upgrade and a number of posts were lost. They have posted on the forum only recently that this occurred.

[Mark S.]

I've been playing Beta .15, and so far so good.

I am dynamically grouping and ungrouping players via events using Sonos Actions - these actions seem quicker and seem to consistently work, and now without interrupting or stopping music play on the source (groupmaster) player. The trick is getting my head around how to formulate grouping events that do what I want - but they work! Players do seem to be returning to their original groupings after the announcement regroup. However, I do see clipping and choppiness of the announcement when I have 2 source players playing music (House and Master Bath) and the announcement event groups them together for the announcement - I only hear a few words of a short announcement. Is there some way for me to arrange my event to minimize this - e.g., pre-build the group, add a wait, something? The good news is that the players now return to their original groups and continue playing (albeit on the next song, which I know is a Sonos thing).

I am seeing some weirdness trying to use the group and ungroup commands on the Master Control device - they are a bit slow and sometimes don't work at all. If I group using Sonos Actions first, then the Master Control group/ungroup commands definitely don't work - but maybe that is supposed to work that way?

I need to play with announcements some more, but again they seem to be more reliable so far. I have heard some clipping at the beginning of group announcements, but I assume that is due to timing required to complete the group? Any method to address that in my events? I am seeing some out-of-sequence and clipping-of-beginning when I run multiple announcements in one event, especially to grouped players - but I do understand that is a torture test and not something I intend to do.

Thank you so much for the update and for all your help in getting me going on Sonos4. I still have a lot of tweaking to do, but the basics seem to be working.

[dcorsus]

Just posted release 4.0.1.16 in the beta section. This should fix the issue where you cannot play a track when using the player control navigation function. Now last would be those m3u ... BUT ... what I have seen on my system with .wpl is that they hold an absolute path to the tracks in the playlist. If you move or rename the path to the content, these playlists are useless.

[dcorsus]

However, I do see clipping and choppiness of the announcement when I have 2 source players playing music (House and Master Bath) and the announcement event groups them together for the announcement - I only hear a few words of a short announcement. Is there some way for me to arrange my event to minimize this - e.g., pre-build the group, add a wait, something?

play with these settings in the sonos4.ini file, but stop HS4 when you do that!
AnnouncementWaitforPlayTime=0
AnnouncementWaitBetweenPlayers=0

Start with setting AnnouncementWaitforPlayTime=2 and take it from there.
By the way, I seriously doubt the choppiness has anything to do with waiting, I suspect that is a network or HS PC issue (remember the HSPC acts as a web server to "serve" (stream) your announcement file to the source player). If the HS PC has bouts of being busy and not serve up the file, the player will stutter. You wrote you had a boost, why not try it out OR try a different source player, something that is wired instead of wireless.

I am seeing some weirdness trying to use the group and ungroup commands on the Master Control device - they are a bit slow and sometimes don't work at all. If I group using Sonos Actions first, then the Master Control group/ungroup commands definitely don't work - but maybe that is supposed to work that way?

Indeed, sonos actions and device actions now live in different universes, even if they happen to have the same name (see a few postings back). Just remind yourself that you cannot ungroup (an announcement group via a device action) what you didn't group first, this is a dynamic stored state and your ungroup will take you back to what you had .... which could have been a grouped setup (say you activated the device action twice)! If you restart the PI, that "previous" state is gone, so you cannot ungroup anything.

I need to play with announcements some more, but again they seem to be more reliable so far. I have heard some clipping at the beginning of group announcements, but I assume that is due to timing required to complete the group? Any method to address that in my events? I am seeing some out-of-sequence and clipping-of-beginning when I run multiple announcements in one event, especially to grouped players - but I do understand that is a torture test and not something I intend to do.

perhaps post your event, because running multiple announcements, unless concatenated into one action, or on DIFFERENT players or fully separated by "wait till announcement ends", will get you in trouble! The PI tries to execute as quick as possible, that means announcements for different groups run in parallel and if they share players, you will have problems as one action is trying to group players, or store state, whereas the other is doing the same , stepping on each other's toes and when it is time to ungroup it all, it could be mayhem.

Let me know how the latest .16 beta goes with your tracks and playlists. If it doesn't work, first thing, look at the Sonos APP while doing it, you may see the error there (such as resource not available etc.)

[Mark S.]

I've been on Beta .16 for several days now, and problems are minimal. Those glitches I do see - like slow or no response - I think may be related to Homeseer/network being boggled at the time. The basics of the Sonos integration seem to be working well now - grouping, ungrouping, announcements, music. Sometimes I see that music does not resume playing after an announcement - but seems random. Setting AnnouncementWaitforPlaytime to 2 definitely helps prevent announcement clipping, but the delay time might be a tad too long, maybe such that music is not resuming. I set it to 1 to see if that is a better compromise - time will tell.

Regarding the webplayer, playlists and tracks are indeed working now. Thank you for the fix. Now I'll see if I can get these frames to work in HSTouch. One more issue I'm seeing withe the webplayer is that the Search at the top of the Browse frame is not working well. The search result is returned in a tiny box that is impossible to read or use. Also, I can't find a way to navigate out of the search within that frame. If this tiny box issue is just me (using Chrome), I'll send some screenshots.

I truly appreciate all your support in getting me up and running. Most of it was simply getting my head straight on how things are supposed to work (e.g., master device grouping vs. action grouping), and how they work best (e.g., concatonation). I hope this thread helps others who may be similarly frustrated by the upgrade. I do have more questions, but I'll start new threads for those discreet issues. Thanks again.

[dcorsus]

Sometimes I see that music does not resume playing after an announcement - but seems random. Setting AnnouncementWaitforPlaytime to 2 definitely helps prevent announcement clipping, but the delay time might be a tad too long, maybe such that music is not resuming. I set it to 1 to see if that is a better compromise - time will tell.

Resuming of the music, should not be influenced by the setting of a delay, unless there is something else going on. However, depending on what source you were using to play your music, not everything can be resumed from where it got interrupted by the announcement. For example, you can't obviously pause life radiostations, but the same goes for many premium content services and this is a short coming in how Sonos works. One could argue that you can pause say Spotify with the Sonos APP, the point is that we switch the player away from a premium services, to play something from its queue, and it seems Sonos loses the context it was operating under with that premium streaming service. However, the service itself should resume, but perhaps not at the same spot where it got interrupted.

To make it even more complex, Sonos has yet another way of streaming music, the type that was controlled from say Amazon's Alexa. So if you use Alexa (and perhaps also Google) and you say, Alexa play Coldplay radio on Kitchen player (and this is Amazon music content), now actually Alexa is in charge as it holds control over the content. That service cannot be re-established after an announcement.

Acknowledging that Sonos' support for streaming services that can be controlled by other 3rd pty controllers, will lead over time to more issues, that's why I added support in HS4 for Sonos' AudioClip functions which sorta "overlays" the announcement on top of whatever is happening. The drawback of this is that it is cloud based so you need an active internet connection and you can also not "group" them so the announcement will play on all involved players unsynchronized. I personally like that, but sure most will not, nor like in your case, with spotty internet, you would have no announcements if the internet is not there. To poke fun at this, if there is not internet, this also means that you are not streaming any of these premium services so it is a non-issue they cannot be restored .

I'm going to "officially" release v4.0.1.16 and thanks for your test and feedback.