Sonos Grouping?

Hi folks,

I’m probably just “missing it”, but can someone explain a little how to Group Sonos speakers?

I read in on of the posts to use the “Group feature at the top of the Virtual Remote”, but I don’t see that on any of my virtual remotes.

Fyi… I do have multiple “Sonos Media Player” remotes setup in a single “Activity” and can control each independently just fine.

Thanks in advance!

The Sonos Group functionality appears at the top of any Virtual Remote under the following conditions:

• The ‘Opens Remote’ device for the Activity is a Sonos device.
• The Remote Design is not encapsulated in a Popup Activity.

Thank you.

Ah, that helps. Got it now.

Much appreciated Roomie - keep up the great work!

I can use the group button without a problem, but the capability I would really love is to find a way to GROUP a SPECIFIC SET of sonos rooms as part of a macro (such as part of the “start commands”, or by assigning 1 or more commands to a button). I’ve been looking for this and haven’t found it.

This would be enormously valuable to me, and would be one way in which roomie could add significant value beyond what the Sonos IOS app offers.

Similarly the ability to play SPECIFIC Sonos guide content in a macro or button would very valuable as well.

Any chance of getting this added to Roomie? (OR getting instructions on how to do it if its currently possible?)

Would Roomie support let me know if it is possible to command Sonos to group multiple Sonos devices together as part of an activity definition or do you just have to manually group devices each time you use an activity? I have a “Whole House” room and an activity called “Listen to Sonos”. I can get the relevant receivers turned on and everything is good except I have to manually group the Sonos devices each time.

We’re going to go ahead and cover this here because we don’t expect to make that command friendly until at least Roomie 2.0 so we’re going to cover how to do it the unfriendly way. This requires some technical know-how on your part at least to the extent you can open a plist file in a text editor like BBEdit.

To ungroup a Sonos device, send it the .UNGROUP SET command. It’s that easy. No parameters, done.

To group a Sonos device is more complicated, but can indeed be set programatically. The command you want is .SOURCE SET. It takes just one parameter. The format you need to enter is as follows:

x-rincon:RINCON_##

is a string consisting of, in order:

  1. Source Device Serial Number. You can find this in your Roomie.plist for your Sonos devices under the key “serial”.

1a. Remove all “-” characters from the serial number.
1b. Remove anything after the “:”.

You should end up with a serial number like this:

x-rincon:RINCON_000A1B2C3D45

  1. Append “01400”:

x-rincon:RINCON_000A1B2C3D4501400

  1. That’s it. Add the above as the parameter to the .SOURCE SET command.

So for example you have 2 Sonos Play:3 devices. Serial numbers A and B. You want A to group with B, in other words you want it to follow B’s source. So you want to set A source to B. Thus you send the .SOURCE SET command to device A with the serial number of device B.

Thank you.

Thanks for this!

 

Super helpful - I consider this fantastic support. This app is worth every penny.

This worked like a charm. Found it easiest to just open the .plist on the Mac and then manually type the x-rincon parameter into iOS. I can’t program Roomie from the Agent yet can I?

Hi, this works for me with two sources but not when I try to group more than two - is there a trick?

Thanks in advance - Joe

To answer my own question: sonos doesn’t group things - it sets the source to another sonos’s output. So if I have three rooms I want to group:

Set source of sonos b to sonos a

Set source of sonos c to sonos a

…then they’re all driven by the same source - “grouped”

To expand on this thread, our post with the complex instructions above from last year is no longer needed. The new .SOURCE SET command introduced in version 2.4 yesterday now allows easy grouping of Sonos device by command. Just select the master Sonos device from the list when adding the .SOURCE SET command. Make sure to add all of your Sonos devices to your configuration beforehand.

Thank you.