Frequent problems loading or playing songs from Spotify playlists using the Sonos app

When using WiFi, what WiFi band, channel and channel-width are you using to connect your One SL speaker to your router and what router make/model is it?

Are there any features on the router like QoS/Airtime Fairness/Firewall/Parental Control/VPN etc. Have you perhaps tried using a different DNS server, if cinnections are timing-out?

Also have you tried the speaker wired direct to the router, just to see if the issues are resolved by doing that?

Last, but not least, who is your ISP provider and what is their download/upload speed limits that you are subscribed to? 

My router is a Netgear Nighthawk R7000.
My Sonos device is using the 2.4Ghz band which uses channel 06.
The router is set up to use the Google DNS server (8.8.8.8) and Dynamic Qos is enabled.
Cox Cable is my ISP. I’m not aware of any limits but my last speed test showed
a download speed of 324.15 Mbps and an upload speed of 10.54 Mbps.
I haven’t tried hardwiring my Sonos device to my router but I can.

But, if the problem had anything to do with my internet connection, my router, or my WiFi,
why would I only have problems when using the Sonos app to play from Spotify?
Why would Spotify work fine when using the Spotify app on my PC, my Smart TV, or my Roku?
Why would Spotify work fine on the Sonos device when I use the Spotify app instead of the Sonos app?
Why would the Sonos device work fine when I play from a service other than Spotify (Sonos Radio)?
In each case, my ISP provider, my router, and my Wifi are the same.

I just hardwired my Sonos device into my router. It made no difference.
I tried loading 188 playlists into the queue. I got “An error occurred while adding tracks to the queue 1002”. The songs from most of the playlists were added to the queue but some of the playlists were skipped.

I submitted the diagnostics: 979564211.

I just turned Qos off, rebooted my router, and reran the test (using WiFi but with the Sonos device a few feet from the router). I got the same error and like before, most of the playlists were added to the queue but some were skipped. (The playlists that were skipped were not the same.)

Diagnostics: 2024233555

Try the router here - see if there are features like ‘QoS’ or ‘Airtime Fairness’ and just disable those (if enabled) and see if it makes a difference. You can always restore them back.

I do also fully appreciate the things you have mentioned, but I was just thinking there are things you could still try with your setup to perhaps try to narrow things down a little to get closer to the root cause.

I mostly use Amazon Music & Deezer here, but do have the Spotify ‘Free’ version service setup and personally speaking whenever I do use it via the Sonos App, I don’t have any issues with Spotify at all.

So my own personal experience seems to be somewhat different to the one you describe. Hence the suggestions to maybe try a few things obvious and to see if it might resolve your issues.

I have disabled Qos, rebooted my router, and rerun my test more than once (with the Sonos device connected via Wifi). I still get “error occurred while adding tracks to the queue, 1002” each time but the playlists that are skipped vary from test to test.

At this moment I am still convinced that the root of the problem is Sonos’ inability to handle Spotify’s intermittent (but becoming more frequent) slowness, and that it could probably be resolved by Sonos increasing a timeout value so it would wait longer for Spotify to respond.

This issue drives me absolutely NUTS! It is not a router issue, because Sonos works just fine with all the other products (Youtube Music, Sonos Radio, etc.). If it is a Spotify issue, Sonos should have their tech team talk to Spotify’s tech team to ensure the integration is working. I cannot believe you’d sell a speaker at these prices if it can only play the selected music 80% of the time. 

Are there any example playlists I could maybe try them here, but as I say I only use the Spotify free version but will happily try them on my system.

I seem to think error 1002 is a network connection error where the speaker is having difficulty connecting to the source. Are they big playlists with say more than 1000 tracks?

I currently have 188 public playlists. The average number of songs per playlist is probably a little less than 100 songs (from 20 to around 300) so the total number of songs is around 18,000.
https://open.spotify.com/user/83mnlqxhxhdol6vqbsypr2j8w/playlists

I agree that error 1002 is a network connection error, but I believe it’s caused by the internet connection being lost as a result of a timeout when Sonos requests something from Spotify and Spotify doesn’t respond quickly enough. As it attempts to load the songs from all of the playlists I’ve selected into the queue, each time it finishes with a playlist it sends a request to Spotify to send a list of the songs in the next playlist. When Spotify is too slow responding, a timeout occurs and the internet connection to Spotify is lost, so it skips that playlist, starts up a new connection, and goes on to the next playlist, and when you’re all done you get the error 1002 message indicating that not all of the songs you requested were loaded into the queue. That’s why I end up with all of the songs from most of the playlists I selected in my queue, but some of the playlists are completely skipped, and the playlists that are skipped vary from one occurrence of the problem to the next.

This loading of all of the songs from all of my playlists has been working for me MOST of the time for a long time, but for the last few days I can’t even load a handful of playlists without getting the error. I suspect that’s because the Spotify servers are getting overloaded.