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Hi. Is anyone else experiencing dropouts, skips, etc with Apple Music since Apple Music moved to Lossless? Before Lossless was introduced, I never had these issues. I have tried Amazon HD and Quboz in the past - both high-res services - and experienced the same behavior. Eventually my system will realize it’s not working and then downgrade back to non-Lossless music, but then it will try again 5 songs or so later. We really need a toggle in the app to downgrade to non-Lossless streaming for the systems that can’t handle it.

As a test for a few days, I would try move a One to where the Playbase is, and swap the wired connection a One, move it away from the WiFi router and TV.. See if that improves lossless play back. If the One’s are setup as pair, connect the left one. 

Oh wow. As a quick and dirty, I committed some networking crimes to connect a One to Ethernet - and removed the bandwidth stuff - and lossless works!

I’m genuinely surprised that omitting the wired unit from the Group breaks the underlying networking! haha! Ass-u-me etc, I guess. 🫠

Thanks for the suggestion, craigski!

Yes, many users have faced dropouts since Apple Music switched to Lossless. A toggle to switch back to non-Lossless streaming would be a helpful solution for affected systems. You can find more information on similar issues with multi-room audio and stability in this post. Hopefully, Apple adds this option soon.

 

Moderator Note: This post is likely AI generated.

In case it’s of use to someone else. I’ve had some luck improving Apple Music playback by bandwidth limiting my speakers, forcing Sonos to request lower quality music.

I have 4x Ones and a Playbase, all using Sonos net. The Playbase is too dumb for lossless so if it’s included in playback, there are no issues. The Ones on the other hand, will request lossless and then deliver choppy audio.

I’ve experimented with limiting the bandwidth each speaker is allowed from my router (Asus guide - https://www.asus.com/support/faq/1013333/). I kept dropping the limit and found 1 Mb/s is pretty reliable and almost never requests lossless. I’ve had a buffering issue maybe once in two weeks? I suspect this works because the Sonos, itself, is choosing a worse quality stream as a fallback.

Notes:

  • I appreciate this is a hack but it’s stopped me going mad.
  • There’s probably a more accurate figure to force the quality fallback - I’d be curious to know…
  • If you’re not using Sonos net, I expect this approach will only make your playback more unreliable. (presumably, Sonos net data is transferred between speakers directly, and as such, won’t be limited by the router. The limit should really only impact traffic between the speaker and Apple.)

Thanks gang. Good luck!

Hi Dan - just following up - this worked like a charm and seems to have fixed the skips. I had to go to 0.9 mb/s to stabilize and it eventually got there. Thanks for the hack! I’ll probably post this over on Reddit (and give you credit) if you haven’t since I know there are people struggling over there as well. Thanks again!

I sometimes experience drop out problems in audio, well that’s where I notice it first, and the cause has always ended up being WiFi channel congestion due to neighbouring networks.

To fix it quickly I just restart the WiFi so that it selects a quieter channel when it reboots.

Eventually I’ll get around to seeing if I can make it change channels without such a disruptive move, though I expect that might require buying different gear.

I just wanted to throw my experience into this thread. We sell/install a lot of Sonos products, primarily a mixture of Amps and Soundbars on each of our projects. This is absolutely an issue. We also have been told by dealer support and direct consumer support that this is a known issue, and that the client should use a different streaming service or use Airplay. (The issue does not replicate when using Airplay).

Whenever I come here for support I always see responses that “don’t believe” what people say. It’s mind blowing. 

And for the love of Christ it’s not a network issue.

Thanks have a great day.

I actually just posted about this because I’ve become so infuriated with it over the last several months. I can’t take it. I’ve had Apple Music since the day they offered it as a subscription service and have all my playlist and everything on Apple Music. Ever since the new app came around, that’s been nothing but garbage they’ve been all sorts of random problems. I can’t play any of my Apple Music playlist without it cutting out literally on and off for an entire song until I just give up playing Apple Music. Sonos 100% knows this is an issue and like always they will refuse to acknowledge it and then 2 1/2 years from now they’ll put on the message board. They’ve got to fix for Apple Music. They have the same problem with the Apple TV box every time a Dolby Atmos movie was played on it through the Sonos arc the arc made a loud pop and shut down the arc. It took them three years to fix that problem. I had an arc that I couldn’t use my Apple TV on unless I disable Dolby Atmos on it and they sat around and acted like they kinda knew something about it, but didn’t really know about it and then somehow it took him three years to fix a problem with Apple. I was playing my playlist again tonight every single thing I played dropped out every song I played everything. Switched over to the free Spotify that I have on the app play the same exact songs work perfect not one single drop out the entire time except I’m not gonna buy a whole brand new Spotify account just to use my Sonos when I’ve got an Apple Music account that has 1 billion songs on it that I used to buy back in the day and now that I stream. I don’t know why this company is so bad the last 2 to 3 years I know they fired the last guy that ruined the app and made 99% of the customer base annoyed at, but they’re not doing any better. I’d like to add I have 19 Sonos speakers in my house. Had no problems ever before this new app was introduced Everything worked perfectly everything connected perfectly, and I Rarely had a single issue. All of this started with this garbage app that they still have not fixed and are using all their customers as beta testers for when they could’ve just put the old app back up until this hunk of garbage was fixed.

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