SONOS Radio is contracting with a 3rd party service that maintains the station list. Evidently there is an error at the 3rd party. 

You can manually add a station if you have its URL.

Thanks for the info, and that's exactly what I've done. I was just curious what happened and I wanted to inform Sonos so they could undertake action - if they want to.

Could someone at Sonos tell me if there has been any contact with that 3rd party about this matter?

Bump.

Hi @beynym 

If selecting a radio station in the Sonos app results in playback, then everything that we can affect is working correctly. If what you hear is not what is expected, I suspect that the only ones that can do anything about this is the station themselves - they would likely work with TuneIn to resolve it (Sonos Radio gets it’s list of radio stations from TuneIn). I can only recommend you contact the station directly.

You may have better luck playing from other station aggregates like myTuner, radio.net, or Radioplayer. All of these can be added like any other music service in the app, and do not need accounts.

Add a music service to Sonos

Individual radio stations having difficulty playing is not something that we track - there’s 120,000 radio stations on TuneIn so the task would be formidable and there’s nothing we could do to help, so the task would also be fruitless. If you couldn’t play any radio stations, we would definitely take notice.

I hope this helps.

It does. Thanks, Corry P. I just wanted to be sure about how the Sonos radio system works, and now I know. I'll get in touch with the people from KWPQ FM 103.3.

During a TV/Radio station tour I noticed a lonely PC siting at the end of an equipment rack and was told that this PC managed the station’s streaming. Unmonitored and unloved would be the best description of their attitude toward that PC. I mentioned an issue that I had observed and they said that they would report that to their “IT guy” the next time he came around. To me, this implied that issues would not be fixed quickly -- if ever.

My own attitude is that there are a lot of stations out there and, other than a couple local news stations, the stations are not very unique. If I have any trouble with a given station, I’ll move on. If a station wants to retain me as a listener, they need to stay on top of their situation.

And I agree with others above: A listener’s best approach is to report issues directly to the station. The station has more vested in a given listener than someone at a TuneIn or similar.

With respect to SONOS, it offers an interface that any service can freely utilize if it wants to be available to SONOS users. This is why SONOS has dozens of services available while other players have a small handful. SONOS does not charge for the use of this interface. Since the services are not directly contributing revenue to SONOS, we shouldn’t expect SONOS to dedicate a large staff to monitor each service and each station on a 24/7 basis.

This is what I heard back:

You'd have to contact Sonos/Tunein for technical support. We provide the stream location to them as a pickup point, they then add it to their service.

You can link us directly at:  https://kwpq.org

Would you mind letting us know what you're hearing?

Thank you!

Gary

It feels as if I'm between a rock and a hard place. Any advice?

Contact TuneIn. They are the service aggregator that Sonos uses. 

I mailed TuneIn. Let's wait and see what happens next.

I contacted KWPQ FM 103.3 again and this is what they responded:

Thank you! Those screen shots are a big help.

I spent an hour with TuneIn this morning, and they're indicating that Sonos is not decoding the "json" data in the stream correctly. Resulting in incorrect streams on at least 40 different feeds from TuneIn. That issue isn't something that our station or TuneIn can correct, it's a coding error on Sonos' part. (not the first time we've heard of this, but a first for our station)

I'll write up a tech note for our website, and contact Sonos directly to pass along the tech data from TuneIn.

Thanks for getting back to us on this!

So apparently it is (maybe partly) Sonos’ responsibility. Haven't heard back from TuneIn, I'll keep you posted.

Thanks for the update. There certainly are a lot of moving parts to “easy”.

HI @beynym 

Thanks for sharing that reply - I’ve passed it on to our engineers.

Hi @beynym 

Just a little update for you - I personally am unable to find KWPQ in my searches at all, which must be because I am in the UK. The tier 2 technician I just spoke to was able to reproduce your results, however - it plays, but plays ambient music instead of Blues. He’s going to look into this for us.

Edit: It seems the data we receive contains 2 stream paths. We start the first and if it works, we continue to play. The first path in the list points to the ambient music you hear, while the second points to the correct KWPQ stream. I think the JSON data may have more to do with the station>>TuneIn link than with the TuneIn>>client link. We’re opening a ticket with TuneIn to resolve the matter.

@Corry P 

Thanks for letting me know, I'm happy to see that people are trying to get it resolved!

Hi @beynym 

I believe this issue has now been resolved by TuneIn, though I cannot personally verify due to being in the UK.

No, from where I'm standing it is not. I'll enclose 2 pics. One is displaying the original stream from KWPQ, the other one is what I'm receiving from Sonos Radio. They're different and they should be the same.

@Corry P 

You might want to remove your "best answer” 

Hi @beynym 

Thanks for reporting back. It may just take some time for the change to filter down through the TuneIn/Sonos Radio servers. My colleague can now play the proper stream via TuneIn. For Sonos Radio to reflect the changes may take some hours - it’s just a matter of when our server asks their server for it’s current list. 

I hope this helps.

I'll check back in a couple of hours or maybe tomorrow. I'll report back. Thanks for your assistance in solving this problem!

My understanding is that the TuneIn servers are updated in the evening, US time.

Hi @beynym 

I may have been a little optimistic with “some hours” - the Sonos Radio catalogue update from TuneIn might be weekly.

You absolutely should be able to get the correct stream via TuneIn in the meantime.

@Corry P 

For the last 24 hours I’ve tried to connect to KWPQ FM 103.3 several times. Every time I’ve got the same result: TuneIn and Sonos Radio are playing the same music as the direct web stream URL from the radio station itself. So everything seems to be working as it should. Thanks for your cooperation in resolving this matter!