Some questions about Sonos with Web CoRE

#1

Hi everyone, just a couple questions I’m wondering:

  1. If I have Google Play or Spotify radio playing on Sonos, is it possible to have an event that plays a notification with speech over the Sonos, but then continues playing the same song? Right now if it’s playing a song, I made a piston that says “Speak text and resume” but it doesn’t work, what happens is the song stops, it plays the speech, but then it goes to the next song on the radio and doesn’t continue on where it was. I tried speak and restore but that just speaks and then never plays again. Wasn’t ever able to figure out how to just pause the song, speak and then continue. Would I do that as all separate actions? Like pause, speak, play?

  2. Is it possible to group speakers together with WebCore? I’m trying to make an event where when I run it, it groups living room and kitchen together, then if I run another one it ungroups them back to just living room and so on. Didn’t see if there was an option for that in there.

  3. Can it play Sonos favorites? I didn’t see that as an option, so looking for a way to use an event to skip to the next favorite. If not, can I specify what to play? Like a certain Google Play music station?

Thanks!

#2

I do not have any connected speakers. So I’ll gladly defer to anyone that does. But I’ll try and shed some light based on what I have seen.

  1. This seems to be a common problem I see. Instead of continuing where it left off it just moves to the next song. Now there might be a way to get this to work how you want it too but I typically only see the problems/issues people are having. So maybe someone out there can shed some more light on the subject.

  2. Have you tried selecting multiple speakers when choosing a speaker? Or creating a device type variable and loading all the speakers you want into that and then just call on this device variable in the actions instead.

  3. Again gonna have to defer to someone that has one.

#3

Just a friendly bump. I’m very curious about the capabilities/limitations of Sonos as well.

#4

I have a sonos as well, and have not found a solution to this. If you look at the device in Smartthings, you’ll see the “Noticification” is actually a .mp3. Or at least that’s how it’s presented to the speaker. So this is what I surmise is happening.

Song is playing
Notification piston kicks off
a new “Song” is sent to Smarthings, that song is for example “There is someone at the door”.

Its not the best song, haha. If you go into the sonos app, you’ll actually see it as the song playing. You can even play it again by hitting play.

So, since its actually played a new song, there is no song to go back to. I think its a limitation of Sonos to be honest. I believe with a little work you could probably capture the song playing, and start over, but I believe that it would then just play that song over and over.

If you were listening to a “Station” or playlist, you cant tell it what song to start on, so that would not work.

Because of this I actually greatly reduced my voice notifications. I do have one that “pauses” the sonos and then "hits play when done. That does work.

I got that piston from one of the examples in the community. When the door bell is rang, pause the sonos, and then start playing again when the front door is opened and closed.