B2, Sonos & Mac

[Des Margetson]

Has anyone successfully used the Brennan B2 as the Music Library for Sonos on an Apple Mac? I haven’t, but this is where I’m up to:

I unboxed my B2, set it up on the Network and can see it on my router webpage. The IP address matches  the front of B2

I ripped a couple of CDs (no album info was found but that’s for later, maybe).

I turned on NAS on B2

I started Sonos and tried to add brennanb2 to the music library. I entered the path, username, as passwords when requested.  Like most people on this forum I got “access denied” 

I opened a Mac Finder window and found brennan as a device on the network, but couldn’t connect to it, or to be more accurate I could enter “root” and “brennan” and see the music folder. Nothing in it but I could see the folder. I tried this on both desktop and laptop,

I then used the finder to Go : Connect to server. added smb://brennanb2 clicked + to put it on my favourites list and suddenly Finder could see the contents of brennanb2/music and after selecting a track and double clicking the Mac played it.

Highlighting an item and pressing Cmd-I gives me the info that the item is named smb://brennanb2/music/itemname. So that means NAS is working.

Back to Sonos. Same “Access Denied” Message.

Just to doublecheck I downloaded FileExplorer from skyjos as per brennan website and can navigate to and play a track. (Some tracks only appeared to play 6 seconds and then jumped to another track which won’t be a problem because that’s not what I bought BrennanB2 for) I just wanted to check that something non-apple could connect.

I then went to the Sonos help site and it offered the same way of adding a NAS drive which didn’t work. It did say Sonos works with any SMB v1 server, but I have no idea where or even if Mac can do SMB v1. MacOS help suggested a firewall setting but I can’t see how to tweak it and my system doesn’t seem to care about lan connections only wan ones

It must something to do with user permissions, but what?

Does anyone have an answer? I bought the Brennan specifically and solely to be my Sonos Music Library Source as we have Sonos in various rooms throughout the house. If it cant’t connect it will have to go back. At the moment I am the possessor of a very expensive Digital Clock!

All help gratefully received

[Peter Lowham]

Hi Des,

I think that you are almost there.  If you have a look at this link below, you will hopefully find the answer.  I posted this a while ago and got positive replies from a number of users.  I'm not a Mac user, so I cannot be of any additional help, but I found the information below by googling for 'NAS and Mac OS' I think.  Essentially it seems to be down to making some adjustments to the Mac security set up.

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/brennanb2/BpBXGU2H1_E/NhQRu-LGBAAJ

I think that some users used the string 'smb://192.168.1.20' (but substitute your B2's IP address for the sample one shown here)

Let us know how you get on.

Regards,

Peter.

[Edwyn Corteen]

Hi Des, can't help I am afraid, this sort of issue is why I have stayed well away from Apple devices, hopefully someone who does use one will be able to help. 

[Des Margetson]

Thanks Peter, Opened System Preferences and then Sharing. Selected File Sharing as shown. The problem is that all the folders shown are ones on the local machine, in this case the laptop, which are already shared. I can indeed change permissions on them. Unfortunately Brennan is not shown. When I attempted to add it (click +) nothing happened.

So I figured I needed to connect to Brennan to do this, so I edited the name in the dialogue box and it renamed the laptop!! Luckily I had a note of what it was called and put it back.

So I can't Ctrl-Click the shared folder Brennanb2\music because I can't see it in System Preferences and when I Ctrl-Click the folder directly in Finder it just opens the folder and shows me the contents.

Thanks for trying.

Des