Sonos Alarm doesn't always play specified radio station

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
April 15, 2021
12 replies
1432 views

I've a Sonos ONE SL pair using the Sonos S2 app with a weekday alarm. I have "Virgin Radio UK" set to come on at 07:27 Mon-Fri which is set through the Sonos Radio Station service.

However, one or two days in the week, a completely different (random?) radio station plays instead. Or, the Sonos chime. Today, I had Radio X, another time I had the BBC World service. The app incorrectly reports that I am playing my chosen station. It is not a particular day it happens. It always seems to be one or two days in the week it happens, or the whole week passes through playing my chosen station as expected.

Is there a known issue/bug as to why a different station to the one defined is played at the set alarm time? It appears that this is a long running issue that is now probably ignored as an agravation to many others.

Also, this issue appears to be repeated across your community channels for the past 2 years! Network interference has been cited as a cause. My system is fully ethernet wired back to my router. Plus, if there was a network issue/outage I would expect no music at all rather than a random staton that does play/stream successfully. A lack of understanding of the app and connections has also been offered by Sonos as a cause as well. I'm sure someone having the ability to set radio alarms would show an adept level of usage.

I do think you have a real issue here in that the Radio Alarm feature is not functioning as expected. Please can this be investigated?

Diagnostic information: 352464017

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Best answer by Corry P

Hi @pinnpoinnt

Welcome to the Sonos Community!

Any time that your speakers chime instead of play for an alarm, that means the speaker was unable to establish communications with the streaming server. As you are not using WiFi and no ethernet faults are reported, this can only be due to your network health. To remedy this, I first recommend you switch your WiFi router off for at least 30 seconds. Once you have WiFi again, please reboot your Sonos devices too.

Regarding Radio X - I can see that play on one morning. I can also see that your alarm is indeed for Virgin Radio. The only way I can conceive of Sonos playing the wrong station is if something else told it to at the same time as the alarm. Do you have any alarms set on Alexa or Google? I realise this won’t be on the speakers themselves as they are SLs, but perhaps set on your phone to play on your speakers?

If the wrong station plays again, please immediately submit a diagnostic and record the number given (if taken soon after, the diagnostics will show us the source of the command to play Radio X which the diagnostics you included did not). I recommend you then get in touch with our technical support team, who have tools at their disposal that will allow them to give you advice specific to your Sonos system and what is occurring.

Show previous replies

Corry P

Sonos Staff

Hi @pinnpoinnt

The first - and most important - step when troubleshooting issues on a particular service is to see if they also happen on another service. Until we do this, we can’t tell if the issue is with the service or something local to your network/system.

As Sonos is invested in Sonos Radio to promote HD and other features, it would be in Sonos own interest to identify why in some weeks you have a 60% chance of accurately playing the chosen station at the alarm time.

Of course, but we need to confirm that it is only Sonos Radio that is affected before we can start looking at it as the problem. Hence trying another service. Please try myTuner.

Is there anything at your radio server and the app controller software that isn't lining up?

This would result in thousands of reports from our users that just isn’t being seen. The radio servers are hosted by the companies that produce the radio channel - they are not ours - and Sonos Radio takes it’s list of URLs to access third-party stations from TuneIn. As myTuner maintains it’s own, separate list of stations, it’s good to try it as a way to isolate the source of the problem.

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." - Albert Einstein

P

pinnpoinntAuthor

Contributor I

Hi @Corry P

Thanks for the response.

I’ll try myTuner and feedback on experience.

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