Mac OS Catalina Disaster With Sonos and Roon

[mwheelerk]

Mac OS Catalina has been a total disaster for me so far as far as music goes.  

 

I have used iTunes (Music) for years as many have.  The first issue is that I lost about 1/4 of my 2800 album covers.  Thankfully I have kept an archive of my album art as I quite frequently like to compare cover versions to get the best quality I can.  However is was a very tedious task of re-adding all those covers. The second issue with Music for me personally is the loss of the Column Browser function with Artwork in the Songs view.  I used this extensively for searching my collection and making metadata edits.  I really miss it.  I also do not like the loss of the Genre category that use to be available along with Artists, Albums and Songs.

 

I have Sonos equipment that I use. Now with Mac OS Catalina my Music Library is no longer available to me.  No matter what I do to create a new path to my library, the same path as used by Music my library won't load.  I can still play my library through Music (iTunes) using Airplay but I have reasons that I use Sonos at times.

 

The same thing holds true for Roon.  I can no longer access my library files for Roon.  Each time I try to set the path I get an error message that access is not authorized.

 

I've reach out to all three companies for support but as of now I don't have any answers to solve my problems especially with Roon and Sonos.  The loss of features in Music I will just have to live with.

 

If anyone is using Mac OS Catalina and Music and also Sonos and/or Roon successfully and could provide any insight your help would be greatly appreciated.

[mwheelerk]

Roon issued an update to fix the permission issue with OS Catalina,.  I've just updated it and I'm back in business there.

[mwheelerk]

1 minute ago, Ishmael Slapowitz said:

Just received notice off the update here. Was granting the permissions pretty painless?

I did not have to do a thing but run the update.

[mwheelerk]

On 11/1/2019 at 1:04 PM, cambridgehank said:

But, what is happening with Sonos?  I cannot control my speakers with the Music app?

I wish I knew.  I still can't access my library with the Sonos app though I can use the Sonos speakers through iTunes (Music) and Roon but not JRiver either.

[mwheelerk]

On 11/1/2019 at 1:04 PM, cambridgehank said:

But, what is happening with Sonos?  I cannot control my speakers with the Music app?

From October 5th on the Roon site.

 

"Mac OS X 10.15 Catalina has dropped support for XMLs with the iTunes app, now called Music. The Sonos software looks for an XML file for importing playlists out of iTunes. Because of this, music libraries shared with Sonos will not be able to find playlists that are created in or updated with the new Music app. Please note that the rest of your music library should work with Sonos without any issues, this just affects the playlists in XML format from iTunes.

We'd recommend holding off on updating to Mac OS X 10.15 Catalina, but if you've done so already, you can use AirPlay 2 in the Music app to play your playlists to Sonos (if you have compatible Sonos players). Also, if you have an Apple Music subscription, your playlists and music should be available in there."

The team is investigating this now, and we'll update you when we have more to share.
 

[mwheelerk]

52 minutes ago, realalex said:

I am interested in Sonos as a replacement for one of the Squeezeboxen (the SB Radio, which still works, but I am fearful of when it doesn’t, so I figure I might as well start looking.)

One thing that I am not at all interested in, is using Alexa or any other Sonos software with these Wifi powered speakers. I want to connect the speaker to my Wifi, and then control it with Roon. No junk software and no voice control.

The question is: am I forced to install Sonos apps somewhere to get the unit to 1) install intialy (I assume yes) but also do I need to 2) keep using Sonos software to keep using the product? I just want to use Roon.

Thnx for the input.

Once you have Roon working with Sonos you no longer have to use the Sonos app but it would need to remain installed.