Sonos Grouping, how to use zonegroup, zonegroupid, zonename and group volume

I’m currently trying to work out the control of sonos gropus. I’ve managed to group them with the present tutorials in this forum, an I can play music and stop it with commands to the coordinator.

The only control that still doesn’t work is the volume. When I send a volume command to the coordinator, I would expect the whole group to change it’s volume. Instead it’s just changing the volume on the coordinator itself. Any idea how to overcome this?

Apart from this I recognized, that the values for zonegroup and zonegroupid remain UNDEF and zonename just has the name of the coordinator filled. I expected them to be filled correctly when I use the add command. Do I need to set them manually?

thx in advance for your help!

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Nobody here who can help?

For the sound volume, it may be a bug.

Hmm … i did a short test. The group is recognized in the Sonos App and I can play and pause via the controller for the speaker that I’ve added the second speaker to.
Group Volume is not working, but I can control the volumes individually. The value for Coordinator, Status and so on are not working. The coordinator remains on the id of the speaker itself and the other values just hold UNDEF. They are also not updatend if I play only on one Speaker.

Any Idea if this is the expected behaviour?

I know all of this is working perfectly when the group is updated with the Sonos app. So the problem is certainly how you update the group. How did you update your group ?

And what openHAB version are you running ?

First of all … thx for your help Lolodomo!

In my Test setup I defined a switch that is triggering the following rule:

rule "Sonos Group"
	when Item GroupWohnzimmerBad received command ON
then
	Wohnzimmer_Sonos_Add.sendCommand("RINCON_XXXXXXXXXXX")
end

Item definition is as follows:

String Wohnzimmer_Sonos_Add {channel="sonos:CONNECT:RINCON_XXXXXXXXXXX:add"}

I added the Speakers via Paper UI and therefore have no explicit Thing definition for them.

According to the KARAF Console I’m on 2.1.0-SNAPSHOT Build #947
Sonos binding is on 2.1.0.SNAPSHOT

Do you also see the values updated when you are grouping the speakers via openhab rules?

I have no rule defined to change groups and even no items linked to channels zonegroup and zonegroupid. But now I will be able to reproduce your use case.

Would be great if you find any hint. I just did a little bit of testing on my side. Also when I change things in the Sonos App, I don’t get any updates on the Items.
Did i possibly miss any setting to get the items updated?

If you mean no update for any channel, you have clearly something wrong in your setup as it is working generally very well for me.
If you are talking only about the two specific channels you were talking and I don’t use on my side, I need to check.

Actually I don’t get any updates for all of the channels if I control the speakers via the app … so it has to be the setup I guess.

I installed the binding via the PaperUI (already reinstalled it to check if it’s a problem with the installation and also did an update yesterday to check if that helps, so I’m on Build #951 now).

As also the Channels in the Control Section of Paper UI don’t get any updates, so I guess it doesn’t have anything to do with the Item definition …

The properties of the binding don’t provide any options to configure anything … so I guess they also can’t be the problem …

The configuration of the Sonos Binding itself looks like that:
felix.fileinstall.filename = file:/var/lib/openhab2/etc/binding.sonos.cfg
callbackUrl =
opmlUrl = http://opml.radiotime.com/Describe.ashx?c=nowplaying&partnerId=xxxxxx&id=%id&serial=%serial

I only changed the callbackUrl to try if that helps without any luck.

In general … for the basic installation with usage of the channels in the Control Section of PaperUI there shouldn’t be any chance to do anything wrong … or did I miss something?

One thing to remind: string channels like currenttitle, zonegroup, zonegroupid, … are defined without any default pattern format. That means if you just link channel to items using the auto mode of Paper UI for creating items, the items will be created without pattern in label and any value will then be displayed in UI. In this case, in your sitemap, add a label like item=xxxx label="yyyy [%s]" to get the display of value.
I will propose to add a default pattern for these string channels.

I can confirm that zonegroup, zonegroupid and zonename channels are working as expected.

For information, there was a bug in Basic UI and Classic UI preventing from displaying correctly the zonegroup channel (the value is a XML and some characters had to be escaped). I submitted a fix for Basic UI and Classic UI few minutes ago.

Hi Lolodomo,

thanks a lot for the tip with the string items and your help in gerneral … looks like that has been the problem, so all the updates are working now.
Thanks also for fixing the bugs :slight_smile:

From my side the topic is closed now.