Sonomarchy

Every Sonos zone on your network becomes a selectable system audio output in Omarchy's sound panel. Pick "Office (Sonos Playbar)" the way you'd pick headphones, and whatever the computer plays goes to that room.

It exists for the Sonos generation that has no AirPlay — Play:1, Play:3, Play:5 (gen 1), Playbar, Playbase, Connect, Connect:Amp. If your speakers do AirPlay 2 (One, Beam, Arc, Era, Five, Move, Roam, Amp, Port), you don't need this: enable PipeWire's built-in RAOP discovery (50-raop.conf) and they show up natively with lower latency.

Sonomarchy is a thin, Sonos-specific layer over pa-dlna. It is output only — it does not control playback, groups or volume on the speakers. For that, pair it with OmaSonos; the two don't overlap.

How it works

• The backend discovers Sonos players over UPnP and creates one PipeWire null-sink per zone (bonded stereo partners, surrounds and Subs are hidden — they can't be played to on their own).
• Selecting a zone's sink makes the speaker fetch an MP3 stream of that sink from this machine over HTTP. Latency is about 1–2 seconds: fine for music, wrong for video.
• pa-dlna's generic DLNA behaviour breaks on real Sonos hardware in several ways (chunked transfer, stale URLs after a network change, Spotify Connect holds, track-change teardown). Each one is patched at runtime and documented with what was observed, in sonomarchy.py.

Requirements

• Omarchy with shell plugin support.
• Sonos players reachable from the same LAN (they are found by SSDP; no Sonos account or cloud involved).
• python3 (3.9+) with venv, libpulse (for parec), and lame or ffmpeg for the MP3 encoder. The first start builds an isolated Python environment under ~/.local/share/io.github.nixfred.sonomarchy/venv from the hash-locked requirements.lock (pa-dlna, libpulse, psutil), so it needs Internet access once.

Firewall — read this, it's the #1 support question

The speaker pulls audio from your computer. With a default-deny firewall (ufw on a stock install) that connection is dropped and you get silence with no error. Allow the two ports from your LAN — as root, adjusting the subnet:

ufw allow proto tcp from 192.168.1.0/24 to any port 8080 comment 'Sonomarchy stream'
ufw allow proto udp from 192.168.1.0/24 to any port 8081 comment 'Sonomarchy discovery'

The plugin itself never touches the firewall or asks for elevated rights; these rules are yours to add once.

8080/tcp is where the speakers fetch the stream (the first free port from 8080–8089 is used; the OSD tells you which if it isn't 8080). 8081/udp is where speakers answer discovery. If a speaker is told to play and never fetches the stream, Sonomarchy shows an OSD naming the port.

Install

omarchy plugin add https://github.com/nixfred/sonomarchy.git --enable

Then open the audio panel: your zones are in the output list. Nothing else to configure. Discovery is SSDP, so zones trickle in over the first minute after login or a network change rather than all at once.

If you already run pa-dlna yourself (by hand, or as a user service from a manual install), stop and disable it first — pa-dlna refuses to run twice, and the plugin will say so rather than fail silently.

Behaviour worth knowing

• A zone playing Spotify Connect (or any Sonos "direct control" source) is taken over when you select its sink: the Spotify session is ended so the stream can start. That's intentional — selecting the output means "play here".
• Changing networks (dock/undock, wifi↔ethernet) restarts the backend automatically. Zones disappear for a few seconds and come back with correct stream addresses.
• Track changes are seamless as long as your player starts the next track within 10 s. After you stop playing, the speaker holds the stream for about 10 s before releasing.
• No track titles appear in the Sonos app; Sonos rejects live-stream metadata updates, so they're disabled. Audio is unaffected.

IPC

qs -c omarchy ipc call io.github.nixfred.sonomarchy status
qs -c omarchy ipc call io.github.nixfred.sonomarchy zones
qs -c omarchy ipc call io.github.nixfred.sonomarchy restart

Uninstall

omarchy plugin remove io.github.nixfred.sonomarchy
rm -rf ~/.local/share/io.github.nixfred.sonomarchy

Development

./scripts/validate-plugin.sh   # manifest, entry points, syntax
./scripts/test-local.sh        # unit tests against the plugin's own venv

Credits

• pa-dlna by Xavier de Gaye does the real work.
• pulseaudio-dlna documented the Sonos Content-Length problem years ago.
• OmaSonos set the pattern for a hash-locked Python backend inside an Omarchy plugin.

MIT © Fred Nix