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**dcorsus** · March 17, 2020, 10:46 AM

Apart from high level announcements, I haven't seen any details what S2 will be like, but have to admit I haven't spend time googling. The skeptic in me however believes the change will be dramatic. The reason I think has to do with the fact that even the controller (app) appears different. If it was all about retiring support for older players due to memory, I would think you could still maintain a single app, might not be efficient, but now they have 2 apps to maintain AND a customer base that went nuclear overnight when the news came out. For those of us who grew up, say in telecommunication, we have dealt with structuring and developing SW for devices that are 20 years old and many generations behind current state of the art.

As to your question on support, I will for sure look at what S2 is like. However, the whole industry is moving towards encrypting everything, so if the system becomes closed overnight we'll be out of luck, game over. I wonder if anyone reading this has seen anything from the big boys like control4 for example, what they are saying. There is a likelihood this either becomes an ecosystem where only a few partners will have access and everyone else is out of luck. The other alternative is that it all become cloud based and control of the player by a 3rd party goes through cloud apps with strong authentication and allowances but no more local control, a bit like how most new in-home devices are being delivered. I guess on the bright side here, their direction could be to have the players directly controlled from other cloud bases home automation systems, and yes, I know, most of us don't like that but just saying.
Who knows, perhaps they just want to make some fundamental changes but keep everything centered around UPNP and we have an option to evaluate effort required to update the PI. Just to be transparent, a while back I looked at the code, seem to recall over 100,000 lines of code (!), doing a full rewrite is probably not going to happen but could be an opportunity for the next generation of PI authors to take a stab at it.

**upstatemike** · March 17, 2020, 11:23 AM

I hope they retain all the existing UPNP functionality in the legacy S1 branch at least but I would not be surprised if S2 drops things like UPNP and the PC controller. Also not sure how robust local library support/features will be in S2. I wonder if an S2 controller will even be able to play music from your local library if the Internet connection to the Sonos servers is down?

**paul** · March 17, 2020, 02:23 PM

Originally posted by upstatemike View Post

I wonder if an S2 controller will even be able to play music from your local library if the Internet connection to the Sonos servers is down?

I'd have a hard time believing they wouldn't keep the ability to play from a local library without an internet connection, there would be a riot if they removed that functionality.....

**dcorsus** · March 17, 2020, 03:53 PM

Perhaps I should clarify something, I don't necessarily think that Sonos is going to dump support for finding and playing local content using things like UPNP, I would think that will stay, this doesn't affect anything for them (in my mind). However, up till today, they have made many proprietary extension to UPNP to allow Sonos players to be controlled using UPNP. It is the latter, I'm very concerned off that they might dump. In fact all their player to player communication has been wide in the open using plain vanilla UPNP principles.The writing has been on the wall for a while in that new premium services (ex Spotify) can't really be controlled through this UPNP interface anymore, and I've already spotted some encrypted ports on the Sonos devices, I suspect for player to cloud app communication. Another example is support for Alexa. For those of you who have players that are Alexa enable, you would have noticed that once you utter the key word "Alexa", all players go half volume AND the response is superimposed on existing content being played. I would have loved to find a way to use that to do TTS so I don't have to come up with complex way to pause and resume content but so far I see zero UPNP activity so I suspect it all happens now encrypted between players and the skeptic in me believes that S2 will have a more contemporary API mechanism, maybe JSON or gRPC or something similar all over encrypted channels and will be a ton more efficient for them. As an example, retrieving the Sonos music DB with 20K items takes a minute or two through UPNP messaging.

**upstatemike** · March 17, 2020, 10:57 PM

If S2 substantially breaks UPNP then won't Sonos also need to break it in the same way for the final version of legacy S1? If they don't it will only be another reason for people to stick with legacy systems and avoid upgrading their hardware.

**dcorsus** · March 17, 2020, 11:30 PM

Originally posted by upstatemike View Post

If S2 substantially breaks UPNP then won't Sonos also need to break it in the same way for the final version of legacy S1? If they don't it will only be another reason for people to stick with legacy systems and avoid upgrading their hardware.

As far as I can tell, S1 and S2 will live next to each other as ships in the night, so no need to break anything on S1

**upstatemike** · March 25, 2020, 05:58 PM

Was not pleased to see this post on the Sonos forum (I added the bold part to show what bothered me about it) It is stuff like this that makes me wonder if UPNP will be mantained in S2.

Sebastien D.
Sonos Staff
195 replies
49 minutes ago
Greetings,

Sadly, I don't have any details I can bring to light on this interaction. Sonos is not designed with home automation such as Control4 in mind. We recommend using the Sonos application for the best experience. If you need help with your Control4 integration, it is best to contact your Audio/Video installer or Control4 directly

Announcement

Sonos S2 and the API

Sonos S2 and the API

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