Plex Library on Sonos App: Painfully Slow

[tbathurst]

Server Version#: 1.19.4.2935
Plex Running on SYNOLOGY NAS.

I recently decided to ditch iTunes and SONOS own Music Library in favour of Plex within SONOS. I’m not having much luck.

I have the PLEX service set up just fine within SONOS. I have the PLEX library setup with my Music Library - however when I try to Search (or indeed Browse Plex) within SONOS it takes approx 10-20 seconds to return any results.

Previously and typically with the SONOS library and indeed even SPOTIFY from within SONOS results would be returned pretty much instantaneously.

That said since adding the PLEX service within SONOS this actually prevents the SPOTIFY search from returning instantaneous results. Presumably because SONOS is attempting to search PLEX first. If I remove PLEX the SPOTIFY search results are speedy once again.

I think this might be because PLEX is going out to the Internet and back into my Local LAN to fetch the PLEX results (though that still doesn’t really explain why those search results are significantly slower than Spotify, for example).

As a side issue - playing music through Plex is also patchy. If I play an album it will not play all songs - it’ll refuse to play certain songs. If playing an album it might play a couple of sings then just stop. Everything is encoded as ALAC.

If I disconnect my router from the Internet - the Plex search within SONOS doesn’t work at all.

I have attempted to do this with both Remote Access Enabled / Disabled within Plex.
The one curious aspect is that even though (when enabled) I can remote access my server from outside of my LAN - Plex always shows a Red cross after the Public IP address. I’ve tried both manually specifying the port and not doing so. The respective port is open on my router.

I wondered if anyone else had experienced similar with Plex within SONOS? Or could give any hints and tips what to try. It’s pretty unusable at the moment.

Cheers
Tom

[tbathurst]

I have a little further information to add, having done some more digging. I can actually see through the Plex console that when I search via SONOS that search request comes in from the WAN, even though the search is made (obviously) from the WAN using the PLEX for SONOS services.

Any ideas?

[Popat_Lal]

exact same experience for me. I’m sorry I have no solutions. I was going to invest in a couple more Sonos speakers but think I’ll give them a miss and go with something else. Seems to the a major challenge for both apps to work seamlessly. Very disappointed.

[mzpost]

We’ve got excatly the same issue having just set up a Plex server on a 918+. I had thought it might be related to the files being ALAC so I’ve switched to Flac (which we will use for everything now) but still have the same issue. The message we get it sonos has lost connection to Plex server which is annoying. It also sometimes stops whilst playing (annoying especially as everything is hardwired so it’s not a WIFI issue). Seems to be all over the place as some albums play no issue and then can have a problem for a few tracks or a whole album.