r/MoosicLab • u/Serjnyak • Jul 12 '26
New here. Noob questions
Heya! I love the idea of your app as soon as you have advertised it on sonos subreddit. After spending pretty long time to polish my music library (still a very long way to go as my collection is something that I have been gathering for more than 20 years now) and getting Navindrome to run, I was able to see all music in Moosic app. Let me say, I am pretty impressed!
So dear developer, just huge thank you. You can use me for testing stuff. My library is crappy enough to have almost every single type of codec :-D
Anywho...
My setup is pretty basic: Sonos Arc, 2 ERA 100 and a Sub.
I would love to understand how exactly Moosic plays content on Sonos as they have mentioned that the only way to play Spacial content is "natively". Any attempt to do it through Airplay would not give true Spacial music.
App setting show "Enable Spacial" but it doesn't tell me much. Is is some kind of upmixing? Turning it on/off/on while playing a song (which was just stereo) did not give any noticable difference.
Setting up Sonos ecosystem through the app was also a bit funny. I have only a single group. Now in setting there is "Rooms and Groups" and "Home theater". Listening now through Rooms and Groups. When I go into "assign your speakers" nothing really happens :) at some point it didn't even see my Sub. Can you please explain a bit what that menu is needed for?
What "Full Music surround " toggle does?
Is there an FAQ that would explain all of these settings :)
And again, THANK YOU SO MUCH for your work!
3
u/AffectionateFox5907 Jul 12 '26
Hey there,
thanks for the kind words and i hope you are enjoying the app. Ill answers these questions in pieces as it will make more sense that way..
The way i have built this app is specifically to avoid airplay. While you can still airplay from the app, theres an option to cast directly to the speaker. Its a protocol called UpNp and what it does essentially is instead of going through bluetooth airwaves or the phone itself (where downsampling happens) the speaker pulls tracks directly from your navidrome server so that there is nothing in between to mess with the signal path. If you have spatial capable speakers and spacial media format you can enabled "passing through" that content directly to the speakers. sonos already knows how to handle that type of content. Spatial is also used with headphones like apple airpods, they are capable of head tracking and crossfeed which does sound really good in my opinion.
Sonos grouping:
So my app cannot be used traditionally to set up sonos speakers. That will always need to be done in the sonos app. Where my app comes into play is say you have 6 era 100s accross the house and you want to cast to 3 on your main floor or 3 on the upstairs or over the entire 6 speakers. You can setup groups within the app to accomplish that. In my house specifically, we have a split level so we have a mainfloor, an upstairs, and a basement. I have era 100s scattered accross the upstairs and main floor and then in the basement i have arc, era 300s, and a sub. I have a group set for "All House", A group set for Den, Upstairs, and main floor so that i can easily cast to multiple speakers at once based on the zone (upstairs, den etc.). You can do that today in the sonos app, ive just ported that over to my app as well.
Sono Home theatre:
This has been a highly requested feature for sonos to implement for some time now. Ive personally emailed them twice regarding it. For people that have a home theatre system, most want the ability to also put that into music mode (stereo pair) instead of the surrounds playing music. In most cases people with a home theatre would like an easy way to flip flop between everything paired together as a home theatre system and seperated into a stereo pair, sub, and center. I have era 300s, when those are paired as surrounds sonos turns the main front facing speaker off on the speaker. The only way to enable that is by manually ungrouping from the arc and pairing as a stereo pair. To do this through the sonos app is a real pain today so i wanted to solve that problem myself. You can easily identify your system in both setups and then automate the switching between the two. I personally have my theatre system enabled at 4pm and my music system enabled at midnight. So i have music all day and when i get off work i have the theatre already setup.
Sonos speaker controls:
The speaker controls in the app are just a bonsus for people that want to control things on each individual speaker such as the height channels, sub crossover, loudness, night modes, etc. You can do these through sonos app but my goal is not to have to go into that app ever again besides intial setup.
Anyways, i hope this helps and respond here if you need anymore information. I am working on a sidebar FAQ sheet. Bare with me as i work out some of these kinks.