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Question

Reproducible Playback Failure on Sonos Arc+Sub+Era300 with Apple Music Dolby Atmos Album

  • November 17, 2025
  • 2 replies
  • 46 views

I'm using Apple Music with a Sonos setup consisting of Arc + Sub + two Era 300 speakers.

When I play the following album, playback consistently halts mid-track, and the Sonos system becomes completely unresponsive—as if it's frozen. After a short while, it recovers as though it had rebooted.

https://music.apple.com/jp/album/tchaikovsky-the-sleeping-beauty-childrens-album-piano/1825381287
(Tchaikovsky: The Sleeping Beauty; Children's Album; Piano Sonata, Op. 80; Theme and Variations, Op. 19/6 – performed by Danil Trifonov)

If you're using Apple Music, could you try playing this album from the beginning and see if the issue occurs?(not via AirPlay, but directly from Sonos App) In my case, the problem happens 100% of the time, although the timing varies. It usually doesn't take long to reproduce.

There have been reports in this community of similar issues with Sonos + Apple Music—such as tracks skipping, audio dropouts, or playback stopping unexpectedly—and I believe this may be related.

From my experience, music encoded in Dolby Atmos tends to trigger these failures more easily. This album is in Dolby Atmos and features very short tracks (most of the early ones are under a minute), which I suspect creates an especially unstable playback scenario for Sonos systems.

2 replies

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  • Local Superstar
  • 906 replies
  • November 18, 2025

Interesting. I don’t use my Arc Ulta for music playback.

I did try your Apple Music link above, and it drops after 2 or 3 tracks, doesn’t pause, it just stops, then I get ‘No Content’ on the room. I repeated, and same again.

I do listen to Apple Music Lossless in other rooms (not HT / Atmos), but don’t get issues with Apple Music non Atmos content in other rooms.

 


Forum|alt.badge.img+17
  • Local Superstar
  • 906 replies
  • November 18, 2025

When I play the following album, playback consistently halts mid-track, and the Sonos system becomes completely unresponsive—as if it's frozen. After a short while, it recovers as though it had rebooted.

My Arc didn’t reboot, I had a network ping running, and there was 0% loss. Could be a crash/dump of one of the processes specific to Atmos running on the Arc, which causes a restart of that process(es)