Sonos Help

[mcjwalters]

Hi,

Got an ex-demo ZP80 and a new Zone bridge today from Sevenoaks for £210 and am amazed how quick to set up but have a problem with wav files, try to play them and they either refuse to play or stutter. Wma files etc and radio stations have no problems and wireless router and bridge are only 5ft away from zp80 in the same room.
Please help.

 

[The_Lhc]

mcjwalters:Hi,

Got an ex-demo ZP80 and a new Zone bridge today from Sevenoaks for £210 and am amazed how quick to set up but have a problem with wav files, try to play them and they either refuse to play or stutter. Wma files etc and radio stations have no problems and wireless router and bridge are only 5ft away from zp80 in the same room.
Please help.

Hang on just want to get a clear picture here, you've got your router, Zonebridge and ZP80, all within the same same room, within 5ft of each other? What do you need the Zonebridge for, you can plug the ZP80 straight into the router can't you?

Secondly, where are your files coming from, ie where are the wav and WMA files stored and how is it connected to your router? I'd hazard a guess from what you've said that you've got them on a laptop connecting wirelessly to the router? If so then Sonos really don't recommend that, they say you should have your storage wired to the router, otherwise you can't guarantee the bandwidth for higher bitrate files (and wav's the highest of the lot).

If I'm wrong let me know what you've got set up.

 

[mcjwalters]

Hi,

Needed a zonebridge as unable to hardwire the ZP80 into router, wife and logistics of room not allowing wires all over room to connect ZP80 to my Cyrus amp. Yes I use an external hard drive, non NAS, via to my laptop which is connected to router wirelessly. I use EAC to copy my CD's in umcompressed form.

So from your comments I need either to recopy in a compressed file form eg or buy a NAS hard drive, copy files from original hard drive and wire into router ?

 

[Anonymous]

Although the Sonos does support WAV files, Sonos do not recommend their use. I have encountered the same problem, although haven't tried connecting my laptop to the router with CAT5. I think the same issue would occur unless the zoneplayers/bridge were also connected in this manner

 

[mcjwalters]

Thanks,

So which form of copy file do you use ? and is there an easy way to copy all of the wav files to the new form onto a NAS hard drive ?

 

[Anonymous]

I use 320kbps MP3 on my computer, although I tend to use the Napster Music Service or my CD player for listening to music.

 

[The_Lhc]

mcjwalters:
Needed a zonebridge as unable to hardwire the ZP80 into router, wife and logistics of room not allowing wires all over room to connect ZP80 to my Cyrus amp.

Hmm, ok, 5ft doesn't seem an insurmoutable problem, but whatever, it's nothing to do with this problem anyway.

Yes I use an external hard drive, non NAS, via to my laptop which is connected to router wirelessly. I use EAC to copy my CD's in umcompressed form.

So from your comments I need either to recopy in a compressed file form eg or buy a NAS hard drive, copy files from original hard drive and wire into router ?

Thought so, it's mainly that the source (laptop) isn't wired to your router, so it can't sustain the bandwidth needed to transfer WAV files, your suggestion should (NAS wired to router) should work fine, although you'll have to tell the Sonos that a new share is being used. If you use the Desktop Controller on the laptop to set it up it'll be straightforward.

And of course this will also mean you won't need your laptop on in order to play music.

 

[The_Lhc]

alexisno2: Although the Sonos does support WAV files, Sonos do not recommend their use. I have encountered the same problem, although haven't tried connecting my laptop to the router with CAT5. I think the same issue would occur unless the zoneplayers/bridge were also connected in this manner

Not necessarily, after all the Sonos Wireless network has been designed specifically for this in mind (you can get problems if you connect anything else to the ZP ethernet ports, ie using them as a bridge, then the Sonos network can't guarantee to keep sufficient bandwidth for the music). That being said I'd still use lossless, just for the hard drive space really.

 

[The_Lhc]

mcjwalters:Thanks,

So which form of copy file do you use ? and is there an easy way to copy all of the wav files to the new form onto a NAS hard drive ?

Use flac. There's plenty of convertors, the basic FLAC front end is, well basic, but you can point it at a directory, tell it to convert everything in it and specify a different directory for the output, so if you had your new NAS connected you could do the convert and copy at the same time.

Incidentally, how do you get on with lack of tagging with WAV? That's another advantage of flac (or any other format, pretty much), full ID tagging support.

 

[fahim]

I would recommend that you investigate dBpoweramp and convert your WAV files to FLAC using the batch converter directly from your laptop to the NAS.