Would you point me at these posts/threads, so that I can do some research?



I'm going to hazard a guess here, but the Sonos doesn't, as far as I know, actually play the Napster music from your phone, but instead the speakers reach out to the Napster server to get the music to play. So, your contention about having to re-download doesn't make sense to me.



But if the speaker can't reach the Napster server at the moment it's trying to play the particular song, then it's going to give you that "unable to play" error. Which indicates that there's some reason that is causing your speakers to lose connection to the internet.



What I'm going to suggest is that you've got a potential issue with wifi interference which is causing your speakers to occasionally lose connection to your router, and hence the Napster servers.



However, there's a smaller possibility that you've got a duplicate IP address issue with one or more of your speakers. You can test this by unplugging the speakers, rebooting the router, and then plugging the speakers back in.



But, it's always possible that neither of these two suggestions are not correct for your situation, so if you attempt both of them, and they don't work, I'd recommend that you submit a system diagnostic within 10 minutes of replicating this issue, and either post the number here, or contact Sonos to discuss it. There may be information included in the diagnostic that will help Sonos pinpoint the issue and help you find a solution.

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Thanks for responding but Napster connection cannot be the issue because there are 97 songs in the Sonos Playlist I created and only 10 or so won’t play...if there was a connection to Napster problem, none would play. Also, as I mentioned in my original post....you can visually see what songs won’t play even before you load the playlist into your queue, as each have a black icon next to the song instead of the album art.

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A few troubleshooting questions...

1. If you just leave the controller for a couple of hours, say, do those songs remain unplayable or do they resolve themselves?

2. Are the songs 'blacked out' and unplayable through the Sonos app on all your Sonos controllers? (If you have more than one.)

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Songs are permanently unplayable on all controllers and via all app devices. I have heard this could be a licensing issue but don’t think that’s the issue either because I can go onto Napster...download the unplayable song again to the playlist...remove the blacked out song and then I can play it the previously unplayable song.

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This seems weird, certainly. I'm trying to get a picture of what yuo see and when. So let's imagine you have a new Sonos playlist that you have just created with its first track. You want to add another track from Napster. Do you do a universal search then select from Napster? Do all tracks look 'normal' at that point? At what point does a track go 'blacked out'? Is it when you add it to the playlist? Or does it seem initially OK but you open the playlist later and it's gone unplayable? It sounds from your original post that they are OK initially?



When you say 'download to the playlist' does that just mean tapping the three dots and selecting 'Add to Sonos playlist' or something else?

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Further thought.... a playlist is essentially a list of locations from which to fetch the songs on the Napster servers. So maybe - for some reason - that path is getting corrupted on some tracks so that Sonos hits a dead end. 'The connection to Napster was lost'. You replace it with a 'clean' version of the path, and all is well again.



This is probably a daft idea but.... try powering off all but one of your units and see if the problem occurs. If it does, try with another unit as the only one powered on. Playlists are copied to each player's memory, so maybe one of them is corrupting things. I expect someone will come on here before long and say this is complete rubbish! It is certainly speculative!

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