Part of announcement missing

[Mack1979]

I'm having a few problems with the plugin stopping doing announcements. I have to remove the contents of the announcements folder and restart HS3, then it works OK again for a while.

Now it is cutting off the start of the announcements on some of the Sonos. Some of them get the whole announcement, but some of them only start playing a few seconds in. For short announcements this might miss most of the speech.

Any idea what could be causing the delay? I have 5 zones, and it seems to take a while to link/un-link them viewing on the Sonos windows app.

[dcorsus]

I'm having a few problems with the plugin stopping doing announcements. I have to remove the contents of the announcements folder and restart HS3, then it works OK again for a while.

Now it is cutting off the start of the announcements on some of the Sonos. Some of them get the whole announcement, but some of them only start playing a few seconds in. For short announcements this might miss most of the speech.

Any idea what could be causing the delay? I have 5 zones, and it seems to take a while to link/un-link them viewing on the Sonos windows app.

Could you provide more information. What OS are you using, how much memory available/in-use, CPU loading, screenshot of your events, your player table? How is your network built? Are there wired and wireless parts? Maybe a network loop between players as the players themselves might be extremely busy communicating with each other. What firewall are you using? What version of the PI are you using?

It seems to be pointing to a resource issue (memory, network) or I've seen firewalls for some inexplicable reason taking forever to allow messages through.

Did anything change recently to your set-up? Anything got upgraded? Have you checked the PI's (not HS3) allowance settings in the firewall?

Dirk

[Bob_Linux_User]

Now it is cutting off the start of the announcements on some of the Sonos. Some of them get the whole announcement, but some of them only start playing a few seconds in. For short announcements this might miss most of the speech.

I have experienced this and determined that if you have several SONOS speakers (I have 5 + Playbar, Sub and 2 surrounds (Play1's), and you send the Announcement to "ALL" or multiple speakers, it takes awhile for SONOS to group all of the speakers for the Announcement. Sometimes the Announcement is started before the SONOS system actually has the grouping complete and part of the Announcement is missed by some speakers. If you manually group all or the selected speakers prior to sending the Announcement, the Announcement will work every time. I have also seen where the network would inexplicably slow down and cause SONOS problems. A router reboot clears the issue. I have always had problems with some speakers not ungrouping after an Announcement completes. The problem is random but occurs quite often. When this happens, the speakers fail to resume their previous play state. Hope this helps.

Bob

[dcorsus]

I have experienced this and determined that if you have several SONOS speakers (I have 5 + Playbar, Sub and 2 surrounds (Play1's), and you send the Announcement to "ALL" or multiple speakers, it takes awhile for SONOS to group all of the speakers for the Announcement. Sometimes the Announcement is started before the SONOS system actually has the grouping complete and part of the Announcement is missed by some speakers. If you manually group all or the selected speakers prior to sending the Announcement, the Announcement will work every time. I have also seen where the network would inexplicably slow down and cause SONOS problems. A router reboot clears the issue. I have always had problems with some speakers not ungrouping after an Announcement completes. The problem is random but occurs quite often. When this happens, the speakers fail to resume their previous play state. Hope this helps.

Bob

Randy Prade (Rprade) has done extensive testing on his setup and his conclusion is that you should never have more than one player hard wired and one should rely on the Sonos network to do its magic. I've struggled in the past with having more than one Sonos player hardwired and noticed network loops causing players to become extremely slow, dropping out on occasion (hard to see if you are not studying your log) but with all kind of strange side effects, kinda as described above.

Dirk

[Bob_Linux_User]

Randy Prade (Rprade) has done extensive testing on his setup and his conclusion is that you should never have more than one player hard wired and one should rely on the Sonos network to do its magic. I've struggled in the past with having more than one Sonos player hardwired and noticed network loops causing players to become extremely slow, dropping out on occasion (hard to see if you are not studying your log) but with all kind of strange side effects, kinda as described above

Dirk,

I vaguely remember a discussion concerning this and now I remember that at that time I actually removed the ethernet cable from my playbar. That made my Play5 to be the only hardwired SONOS. However, since then I have added a Play1 in my garage and it is hardwired to my Access Point in the garage. Guess I need to configure that Play1 for WIFI and see if my problems clear. Thanks for jogging my memory.

Bob

[randy]

Just a quick point of clarification. I also have occasional truncated announcements. My system is all WiFi, now through a Ubiquiti AP. I started with a Nighthawk R7000. My Sonos network was having problems streaming FLAC (high bitrate) audio from my media server. I tried a single copper connected Sonos Connect:Amp which really helped the high bitrate streaming, but I ran into all sorts of errors with the plug-in, primarily about the transport being "locked" on one of my 10 Sonos devices. When that error occurred the entire announcement would fail. I went back to a pure WiFi and the errors were reduced to once a week, but I still had occasional announcements that would be cut off at the beginning. They would start prior to the plug-in completing the grouping. I also would occasionally have the players fail to ungroup or return to their prior state after an announcement. Then I tried a Sonos Boost to see if it caused any problems and the "locked" transport errors returned. It basically acted the same as if one of the units was connected with copper.

Then I decided to try a Ubiquiti AP setup. I have 3 Ubuiquiti UAP-AC-PRO APs. This solved my high bitrate failures, but the occasional announcement failures remain. We have just decided to put up with the occasional error, with my wife laughing that Zira (Microsoft voice) must be in "a mood".

These failures are only often enough to be a nuisance, they do not happen every day. They are almost exactly as the OP described, albeit infrequent. We consider the Sonos App control to be 100% reliable and the plug-in to be 95% reliable.

It was a Sonos tech that said connecting more than one unit to copper was not recommended. He stated that while they had designed the system to deal with multiple copper connections, some home switches do not deal with spanning tree issues and can have problems. He stated that Sonos always uses WiFi for unit to unit communication. If there is any copper involved, Sonos sets up its own "SonosNet" and operates on a different channel than your household WiFi (2.4ghz). The copper provides the connection to your LAN and by extension the Internet. If you have no copper, Sonos uses your home WiFi network for everything.

[Bob_Linux_User]

Thanks Randy,

I have the same issues that you see. I have 2 Nighthawk R7000's with one configured as an AP. My streaming is fine but I do occasionally get the transport locked errors. These normally occur during non use hours (1am to 4 am). I can live with the errors but the failure to unlink and resume is annoying. I did remove the hardwire from the garage to see what happens. I may also remove the ethernet cable from the play5 and run all Wifi. I wish SONOS had 5G connection as that would have SONOS and Echo on a frequency by itself. Thanks

Bob

[Mack1979]

I'm using Win 7-64. 12GB RAM, with at least 2-4GB free, usually more. CPU loading below 25%.

My PC is hard-wired on gigabit ethernet. The Sonos are all on WiFi via Google WiFi boxes (themselves hard-wired gigabit LAN), also providing the firewall. Don't have any problems with streaming music from Amazon Music or Spotify.

PI version 3.1.0.15. I'm on the latest Sonos Beta program, and 3 of the 5 devices are new, so can't be sure whether either of those is a problem, but they all connected up fine and are working OK.

Bit frustrating as the problem is intermittent and I can't replicate it on demand. Any tips to help appreciated. At least might help me narrow it down.

Thanks!

[dcorsus]

I'm using Win 7-64. 12GB RAM, with at least 2-4GB free, usually more. CPU loading below 25%.

My PC is hard-wired on gigabit ethernet. The Sonos are all on WiFi via Google WiFi boxes (themselves hard-wired gigabit LAN), also providing the firewall. Don't have any problems with streaming music from Amazon Music or Spotify.

PI version 3.1.0.15. I'm on the latest Sonos Beta program, and 3 of the 5 devices are new, so can't be sure whether either of those is a problem, but they all connected up fine and are working OK.

Bit frustrating as the problem is intermittent and I can't replicate it on demand. Any tips to help appreciated. At least might help me narrow it down.

Thanks!

Suggest you upgrade to 3.1.0.20. It doesn't have any fixes that match your problem but it does have fixes for players going off-line and not being rediscovered. I suspect this is the cause when your announcements stop and a restart of HS3 (and the PI) makes it work again.

It is a common and understandable misconception that when streaming works fine, it doesn't mean there are no network issues. Streaming works with buffering and re-transmissions which is quite different from real-time processing, sending commands which seems at times to take forever to be ending up to their destination and being processed.

Have you checked the log for errors? How frequently do you see your players dropping out (and coming back with version 3.1.0.20).

It appears to me that it used to work fine, anything was changed lately? If you can catch it being very slow, maybe a log could help? If you say Google wifi boxes, it read plural, why multiple? Is it because coverage in the house was problematic, if so, more WAP will contend for the same RF spectrum and I wonder whether it influences the Sonosnet and/or whether some of the players go direct and some via your google WAPs and your network setup is perhaps part of the problem. Were these Google WAPs recently added? If the problem persists, perhaps take the Google boxes off-line and see if it has an effect (or change channel setting or don't use 2.4G spectrum ....)

Dirk