It’s taken me several months to connect the dots, but I’ve finally figured out why sometimes Sonos is unable to browse music from Plex artist search results. And it’s all about having multiple libraries in Plex.
The problematic behavior is this scenario:
- In the Sonos app, search for an artist on Plex
- Sonos shows the results successfully
- Click on the artist
- Sonos returns “Unable to browse music”
If, instead, you search for an album you can click on the results, see the tracks, and play the music. Sometimes this seems to work, sometimes it doesn’t, and it’s taken me months to find the pattern.
The problem is that my Plex system has two libraries: mine and my husband’s. Overall Sonos handles this well and we can play whatever music from whatever library.
But while artist searches are scoped to all libraries in Plex, browsing artist results is only scoped to the current Plex library. If the current Plex library contains the artist you can browse the search results. If not, you get the “Unable to browse music”. If you change the Plex source to the library with the artist it will work again.
I’m not certain if this is a limitation in the API that Sonos is using to interact with Plex, or if this is a bug in how Sonos is using that API, but knowing what the problem and how to work around it is a start.
Digital Ramblings 