Scenes

A scene is a named snapshot of your Sonos system: which speakers are grouped, who is the coordinator of each group, and what volume / mute each room is at. Save one when the house feels right, restore it on demand.

#Save what you have right now

sonos scene save evening

This walks the live topology, snapshots every visible zone (and its members, volume, and mute), and stores the scene under your config directory.

#List, apply, delete

sonos scene list
sonos scene apply evening
sonos scene delete evening

Apply is best-effort and idempotent — running sonos scene apply evening twice is safe.

#Targeting one room (experimental)

sonos scene apply evening --only "Kitchen"

Only restores the parts of the scene that involve the named room. Useful when you don't want to disturb other zones.

#What's captured (and what isn't)

Captured:

• Grouping (coordinator + members) per zone
• Per-room volume (0–100)
• Per-room mute state

Not captured:

• Currently playing track or queue contents
• EQ / loudness / surround levels
• Bonded satellite topology (preserved but not edited)

If you want a scene that also re-loads a queue, save the queue separately (e.g. capture a Spotify URI) and chain commands in a shell script:

sonos scene apply evening
sonos open --name "Living Room" spotify:playlist:37i9dQZF1DXcBWIGoYBM5M

#How apply works

1. Read current topology.
2. Compute the diff against the saved scene.
3. Dissolve groups that conflict.
4. Re-create the saved groups (each member joins the saved coordinator).
5. Re-apply per-room volume and mute.

If a speaker named in the scene has gone offline, the corresponding step is logged and skipped — the rest of the scene still applies.

#File layout

Scenes live alongside your config:

~/.config/sonoscli/scenes/<name>.json

The format is intentionally readable and stable; you can hand-edit a scene file if you really want to.