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

You might try selecting a larger number, like all of the 70s rock playlists. The greater the number of playlists that are selected, the greater the chance that the error will occur with at least one. (You can select the first and then hold the shift key when you select the last, and all of the ones in between will also be selected.)

I don’t think that’s possible with the free version of the Spotify service within my iOS controller device .. I just usually add each available playlist to the end of the chosen speaker queue. Perhaps you are just simply hitting the 15s timeout when all your chosen playlists are being loaded to the speaker queue?

I believe the only benefit of Spotify Premium (which I have) over the free version is that you don’t hear commercials.

When I set up my Sonos app I selected Spotify, then went to “Your Library”, then selected Playlists and added it to Sonos Favorites. As a result, whenever I get into the Sonos app now, the list of my Spotify playlists (those I’ve created myself and those I am following) shows up under Sonos Favorites.

I always begin with a clean speaker queue, then go to my list of Spotify playlists and select which ones I want to listen to, and then select “Add Selected to End of Queue”. (Most of the time I select all 188 playlists but sometimes I just want to listen to jazz, country, 70s rock, or whatever.)

As I mentioned before, loading all of the songs from all of my playlists into the queue has been working for me MOST of the time for a very long time, but for the last few days, when I attempt to load as many as 10 or 20 playlists into the queue I will usually see the error and some of the selected playlists will be missing from the queue.

It is important to note that when the problem occurs, it’s not because of a single timeout for the entire list. It doesn’t just stop loading songs from playlists at a certain point. When the error occurs I can see all of the songs from most of my selected playlists in the queue, but all of the songs from some of the selected playlists are not in the queue. The omitted playlists are scattered randomly throughout the list and they vary from occurrence to occurrence. This indicates that as it loads the queue, Sonos goes through all of the playlists I selected, and for each playlist there is a good chance that its songs will be loaded, and a slight chance that it will be skipped instead and none of its songs will be loaded. This is why I believe that for every playlist I select, Sonos has to request that Spotify provide a list of its songs, and if Spotify is slow in responding, there is a timeout and the connection to Spotify is lost, and as a result, Sonos skips that playlist and goes on to the next one in the list.

There is a similar problem that doesn’t happen quite as often (but it’s really irritating when it does) when Sonos is playing songs from the queue. When Sonos reaches the end of a song and Spotify is slow to supply the next song in the queue, there is a similar timeout (the Sonos app displays an “unable to play song - Spotify connection lost” message) and Sonos will skip that song and go to the next song in the queue. When Spotify is really slow Sonos will skip a whole bunch of songs in the queue, and when it skips enough it will give up and stop playing altogether.
 

same issue here and for a very long time. all my sonos equipment is hardwired and i’m on fios fiber optic connection that is 1gbps bi directional. i have no other network related issues, latency and throughput are very good. i can not believe that this has been going on so long! no issues when i use spotify by itself. with sonos, it can happen with spotify playlists, albums, spotify artist radio station. it happens at song boundaries and is very annoying! is there something sonos can do to keep the connection alive? can it check and re-establish the connection before the song ends so that it doesn’t have to skip and have gaps? is it the question of too short of a timeout for the next song to start to stream? it has definitely gotten worse in the last few months. this is something that sonos and spotify should be working together to solve, and with the customers to diagnose but it should be easy to reproduce themselves. i would be happy to work with someone to trace / diagnose this or test patches. it happens all the time and i’m very very frustrated… spotify is my primary way of using sonos.

I eventually gave up on the Sonos app. I now just use the Spotify app with the Spotify Connect feature when I want to play music from Spotify on my Sonos speaker, and I never have any problems. I’m not crazy about the fact that I’m no longer able to play songs from multiple playlists in shuffle mode, but I’m getting used to it. (The Spotify app only allows you to play from a single playlist when using the Spotify Connect feature.)

using spotify to push to sonos especially sucks for multi room groups. you can’t control the individual room volumes from spotify. if u go to sonos to adjust the volume, it just magically slides back to where it was. it seems like sonos couldn’t get things working correctly with spotify from sonos, so they decided to make another way to use spotify with sonos from spotify that also sucks. no problem with any other source i use, but spotify is my main and preferred source. this is clearly a fixable problem and shouldn’t need to be fiddled with at the user level.

Let’s hope Spotify create a genuine multiroom option for Spotify Connect then.  If you are using the Spotify app rather than the Sonos app you aren’t really using the Sonos system, just a bunch of Spotify Connect enabled speakers. If you wanr that sort of multiroom control then use the Spotify implementation in the Sonos app.

I am away from my system at the moment, and don’t use Spotify, so I can’t check if this might be a generic problem or just network latency on your system.

funny, things seem to be better once i used spotify to push to sonos. now i’m using sonos again to access spotify and getting less errors. wonder if by using spotify directly it cleared some flags or something? it was literally skipping every other song before, and that is the only thing i have done.