Tried posting many times in the Sonos section, but we aren’t receiving any support there. Maybe someone here can help.
The sonos labs service from Plex does not work. It always fails to connect to plex.tv, even though remote access works just fine everywhere else. The logs aren’t much help either. Any idea when we will get an update to fix this long-standing problem?
It obviously connects to the server because it finds all of the shared servers and their music libraries just fine. It just fails to play any tracks. Sonos will queue the playlist, but then spin for a while on each track before popping up the error you see below, then it tries the next track, and on, and on until it reaches the end of the queue.
Sonos Error Log Saturday, December 23, 2017 - 12:56 PM Unable to contact the Plex Media Server. Please check your server settings at https://plex.tv and make sure that Remote Access is enabled.
I concur. I bought two Sonos speakers with the idea of using Plex exclusively…and it doesn’t work, at all. In fact, I haven’t seen anyone on this forum who has said that Plex has worked on Sonos. I did try disabling my NAT as someone suggested, but that just basically stopped all of my wifi from working and I had to completely reset Sonos. As a lifetime Plex subscriber, it’s a real bummer. I would have gotten a bluetooth speaker if I’d known I was going to run into this mess.
@yogi9644 said:
I would have gotten a bluetooth speaker if I’d known I was going to run into this mess.
That was the primary reason for getting Sonos speakers over some other choices I had as well. I honestly thought this would be fixed quickly, but 2015 turned into 2016, turned into 2017, turned into 2018 now.
jhornert AUTHOR Novice 1 reply 11 days ago
I have spoke to Sonos support and what they are telling me is the same as what someone else has responded on another thread. I have pasted what this person (Mike V) said below and will continue to update this thread as I continue to find a work around for this solution. I plan to contact Plex and my ISP to see what they tell me. My current alternate solution will be to host my Plex Server on my NAS on another Network. So, I will have 2 Networks in my home. Not ideal, but I believe it will work. Will keep posting with findings.
From Mike V:
Depending on the capabilities of your router, you may need to enable an advanced NAT setting to allow Sonos to connect to your Plex server… at least for the time being. The issue is known, but Plex seems to have abandoned all Sonos development at the moment (there has been 0 activity in Plex’s own Sonos forum by any Plex employees for over a month).
The option is often called Hairpin NAT or NAT Reflection. Also, some have found that just manually setting up the port forward in the router instead of using UPnP to create it automatically can solve the problem.
The issue is that Plex is telling Sonos to connect to your server through your router’s WAN IP address. But many routers won’t make a connection for an internal host trying to connect to another internal host using the router’s WAN IP address. When it works, the traffic isn’t actually going to the internet and back, it’s just going to the router and being turned back around. The better fix to this issue would be for Plex to come up with a way to determine if the Sonos device is on the same network as the Plex server and provide the server’s internal IP address instead of the WAN address.
I found a work-around that may even be better. I can eliminate Plex as the “middleman” with Sonos.
Just as with Plex, I keep a computer on 24 hours a day to host my server content on my external hard drives. On this computer, I opened up the Sonos software, went into Preferences, clicked on Music Library and added the folders where I keep all my music (just like you point Plex to particular folders), and now I have access to all of it on Sonos…quick and simple.
I still like Plex for when I’m away from home, and for movies and photos, but it’s definitely not ready to work properly on Sonos, in my opinion and experience. I even tried disabling NAT…only to find that I had no internet or wifi, so that didn’t work for me, at all. Generally, when I need to get this technical with things like NAT, UPnP, WAN, connections etc…inevitably, I make things worse and spend more time trying to un-do what I’ve messed up. Anyway, I hope this helps those with a similar dilemma.
@yogi9644 said:
I found a work-around that may even be better. I can eliminate Plex as the “middleman” with Sonos.
Just as with Plex, I keep a computer on 24 hours a day to host my server content on my external hard drives. On this computer, I opened up the Sonos software, went into Preferences, clicked on Music Library and added the folders where I keep all my music (just like you point Plex to particular folders), and now I have access to all of it on Sonos…quick and simple.
I still like Plex for when I’m away from home, and for movies and photos, but it’s definitely not ready to work properly on Sonos, in my opinion and experience. I even tried disabling NAT…only to find that I had no internet or wifi, so that didn’t work for me, at all. Generally, when I need to get this technical with things like NAT, UPnP, WAN, connections etc…inevitably, I make things worse and spend more time trying to un-do what I’ve messed up. Anyway, I hope this helps those with a similar dilemma.
This is the only way I have ever been able to get Sonos to see plex files on my media server computer.
Yes, Sonos will connect to any network storage just fine.
The whole point of using Plex is for the Plex mixes, the playlists, dashboard, etc. The Sonos controller is the single worst library manager I have ever seen. It has zero Music discovery capabilities. My music library is over 4tb, so I need something like Plex to sort things out.
Just to add my voice: I love my Plex (on my Qnap NAS) and Sonos but I just cant get the two to work together having tried several times over the last couple of years (remote access enabled, several modern routers tested, manual playing with mapping ports, reading the forums). I only hope that the talked about opening up of Sonos to third partys in 2018 will help this situation moving forward (see https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/4/16418946/sonos-platform-open-2018)
Sorry you guys are having these issues, but thanks for posting.
I was about to pull the trigger on a Sonos setup for the house as the wife and I get more into just listening to music on the weekends.
Glad I saw this before I pulled the trigger.
As @wwwizzarrdry noted above:
That was the primary reason for getting Sonos speakers over some other choices I had as well. I honestly thought this would be fixed quickly, but 2015 turned into 2016, turned into 2017, turned into 2018 now.
I guess we can just add this to the pile of crap that Plex will never fix. But don’t worry Plex, you just keep adding new features that will not work.
Anyone have a good system to sort music that works with a system like Sonos?
@rsava said:
Anyone have a good system to sort music that works with a system like Sonos?
Roon Labs. I held out from trying them due to their pricing. However, I recently decided to do a trial and I was sold. Paid for a yearly membership and have no regrets.
@rsava said:
Sorry you guys are having these issues, but thanks for posting.
Anyone have a good system to sort music that works with a system like Sonos?
If you can afford the full Sonos suite, I’m sure the $500 for Roon won’t kill you either.
Yes, Roon is starting to be worth every penny.
Roon works seamlessly with Sonos
Roon still doesn’t offer remote access natively, so either have your vpn handy, or stick to Plex + Android Auto when you’re driving around town.
Roon works great with touchscreens to act as your family jukebox.
Roon support is fantastic. And they have a dedicated presence on the forums (which, after your experiences with Plex missing role call for 3 straight years on this forum, just feels good to support their product).
@rsava said:
Sorry you guys are having these issues, but thanks for posting.
Anyone have a good system to sort music that works with a system like Sonos?
If you can afford the full Sonos suite, I’m sure the $500 for Roon won’t kill you either.
Yes, Roon is starting to be worth every penny.
Roon works seamlessly with Sonos
i am looking into them… cant believe i never heard of it. it would let me get my music library out of plex. but i want remote access to it which is a problem. however it may be worth a trial … i do need Sonos support tho cause that is my home audio system.
I have not been able to use plex since the previous updates where they introduced the constant loudness deep analysis scanning process. it was freezing my cpu with ten-twelve threads scanning all music … which after many posts, they finally acknowledge… saying that they had not thought there were users with large audio libraries (its not the amount of files its the size of the files - an opera is much bigger than a song)
so i have had to revert to three versions earlier in order to use plex
i would love an option for my audio files - i have music and audio (radio shows)
@sogalitno said:
i dont see anything on the Roon website about SONOS… how does it connect?
i am looking into them… cant believe i never heard of it. it would let me get my music library out of plex. but i want remote access to it which is a problem. however it may be worth a trial … i do need Sonos support tho cause that is my home audio system.
@sogalitno said:
i dont see anything on the Roon website about SONOS… how does it connect?
i am looking into them… cant believe i never heard of it. it would let me get my music library out of plex. but i want remote access to it which is a problem. however it may be worth a trial … i do need Sonos support tho cause that is my home audio system.
I just got a sonos one for Christmas and was very excited that they had a Plex app. I love my Plex and interface. Im running into the same issue as others with the unable to connect to Plex message while using it through the sonos app. It’s strange because I put it on shuffle and some of the songs work then others get the error message. I’m new to posting on forums so forgive me if i’m not using proper etiquette. I’m just hoping to get my voice heard so maybe Plex will address the issue.
So I got Sonos Plex service working again. It’s still hit or miss for some reason, but at least I’m back to my old garbage 50/50 success rate.
When I recently switched to hosting my Plex server on a dedicated Rockstor NAS, I chose to use their Plex Rockon (aka Docker image). This seemed to worked out of the box no problem for all of our needs and it was a seamless transition. No remote access issues, better quality streams, etc. Yay.
Except Sonos stopped playing from plex altogether (as you all have read). Finally, I found a solution on the Plex Docker forums that addressed similar remote access issues when running in bridged mode. The docker has 3 IP’s published in the plex resources.xml config.
Public IP (xx.xx.xx.xx:32400)
NAS LAN IP (192.168.2.x:32400)
Docker IP (172.17.0.1:32400)
The docker image actually runs on 172.17.0.1 by default, and the server handles the switch from your NAS IP:32400 to your Docker IP:32400, but it doesn’t do it properly when Sonos tries to reach it for some reason. So I confirmed my port-forwarding was correct, and then I also added a static route to my router for the docker image to add it to my LAN’s subdomain on /24. Waiting a few minutes for the docker image to update and voila! I got my crappy hit-or-miss Sonos Plex service back to limping along.
Port Forward:
Static Route:
Since Plex obviously isn’t going to fix their Sonos Labs beta, this might be the best we can hope for.
There’s a bug that prevents me from marking my own comments as Resolved/Answered. Any ninja can feel free to do so if they please. But IMO this is more of a work-around for a specific use-case than an actual resolution. But it’s more than Plex has proffered in 3 years.
@wwwizzarrdry said:
So I got Sonos Plex service working again. It’s still hit or miss for some reason, but at least I’m back to my old garbage 50/50 success rate.
When I recently switched to hosting my Plex server on a dedicated Rockstor NAS, I chose to use their Plex Rockon (aka Docker image). This seemed to worked out of the box no problem for all of our needs and it was a seamless transition. No remote access issues, better quality streams, etc. Yay.
Except Sonos stopped playing from plex altogether (as you all have read). Finally, I found a solution on the Plex Docker forums that addressed similar remote access issues when running in bridged mode. The docker has 3 IP’s published in the plex resources.xml config.
Public IP (xx.xx.xx.xx:32400)
NAS LAN IP (192.168.2.x:32400)
Docker IP (172.17.0.1:32400)
The docker image actually runs on 172.17.0.1 by default, and the server handles the switch from your NAS IP:32400 to your Docker IP:32400, but it doesn’t do it properly when Sonos tries to reach it for some reason. So I confirmed my port-forwarding was correct, and then I also added a static route to my router for the docker image to add it to my LAN’s subdomain on /24. Waiting a few minutes for the docker image to update and voila! I got my crappy hit-or-miss Sonos Plex service back to limping along.
Port Forward:
Static Route:
Since Plex obviously isn’t going to fix their Sonos Labs beta, this might be the best we can hope for.
The better fix would be for Plex and Sonos to follow the Pandora template and create direct control for sonos speakers on the Plex app. PPPPPPPPPPLLLLLLLLLLEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAASSSSSSSSSSEEEEEEEEE Plex help develop this. I love my Plex and the beautiful interface.
