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Apple Music starts and stops inside Sonos


I just upgraded from my old Sonos 1. Generation (from maybe 15 years ago?) and bought a couple of Move 2’s and a Move.  Installed the new version of Sonos and everything works EXCEPT when I try to play from Apple Music.  I have authorized Apple Music to play in Sonos.  I see the music I want to play on AM.  I select a song.  It either scrolls step by step through the entire album, playing nothing OR if I select a particular song, it seems to play for about one second and then it stops and the play button shows again.  I used Sonos with Apple Music in the past with my old system, never had this problem.  I tried removing and re-adding AM as a service, still the same useless behavior.  I have no idea how to fix this.  Spotify and Sonos Radio working fine.

Ken, thanks for your thoughts again.

 Looks like you’re using a device other than iPhone?

 My system is unstable. It used to work fine. I can stream AM through my phone and to a single bluetoothed Move but that’s where it ends.

 I’ve had two support calls which have taken up hours of my time but nothing they asked me to do fixed it. I don’t have days on end to debug and analyse my system. I have a standard internet/router setup fed by a fast fibre provider. I’ve provided diagnostics to Sonos through the app but the fact of the matter is that I cannot stream AM without my system hanging. I can stream radio no problem through the app but not AM.

 My conclusion to this is that Sonos have done something within their app that causes mine and many others systems to freeze.

 I’m sure they know what the issue is and are working to fix it but at the expense of their customers.

I have an iPhone XR controller that’s working - (attached).

I also have an Android tablet too - that’s okay aswell, except I (and others) have noted that the local library artwork is missing on that controller, but it still works okay.

Ken, the search on AM works okay (ish) and it’ll start to stream but after a short period of time my system and the app will freeze. Only a router reset will restart it. App resets won’t unfreeze things. I can successfully stream radio through the app and I can stream AM directly to a Move from my iPhone via Bluetooth.

 The support guys have no answer other than reordering the primary master speaker. That doesn’t seem to work though.

i know for fact that i’m not alone in this issue. It worked fine for all of us before the new app. Lucky you if you’ve got a working system but I’d wager that there are thousands of us out there that haven’t.


Ken, the search on AM works okay (ish) and it’ll start to stream but after a short period of time my system and the app will freeze. Only a router reset will restart it. App resets won’t unfreeze things. I can successfully stream radio through the app and I can stream AM directly to a Move from my iPhone via Bluetooth.

 The support guys have no answer other than reordering the primary master speaker. That doesn’t seem to work though.

i know for fact that i’m not alone in this issue. It worked fine for all of us before the new app. Lucky you if you’ve got a working system but I’d wager that there are thousands of us out there that haven’t.

The only difference I’m aware of is the new Sonos App introduced us all to Apple ‘lossless’ audio on Sonos and before that their audio was lossy either 256 or 320 AAC IIRC?  -  Similarly your Bluetooth audio is lossy too/uses less bandwidth.

What group of players are you currently playing to? Which device is the group controller and are you using SonosNet or local WiFi …and if it’s the latter, which WiFi band are your player(s) using?

Also what’s your ISP upload/download speeds?

It almost sounds like something is not coping with the more demanding lossless audio, but if that was the case, then I’d expect the service from Apple to work in the same/similar way to how Amazon Music UltraHD works, where their audio will fallback to lossy if there are bandwidth issues detected.


Ken, the search on AM works okay (ish) and it’ll start to stream but after a short period of time my system and the app will freeze. Only a router reset will restart it. App resets won’t unfreeze things. I can successfully stream radio through the app and I can stream AM directly to a Move from my iPhone via Bluetooth.

 The support guys have no answer other than reordering the primary master speaker. That doesn’t seem to work though.

i know for fact that i’m not alone in this issue. It worked fine for all of us before the new app. Lucky you if you’ve got a working system but I’d wager that there are thousands of us out there that haven’t.

The only difference I’m aware of is the new Sonos App introduced us all to Apple ‘lossless’ audio on Sonos and before that their audio was lossy either 256 or 320 AAC IIRC?  -  Similarly your Bluetooth audio is lossy too/uses less bandwidth.

What group of players are you currently playing to? Which device is the group controller and are you using SonosNet or local WiFi …and if it’s the latter, which WiFi band are your player(s) using?

Also what’s your ISP upload/download speeds?

It almost sounds like something is not coping with the more demanding lossless audio, but if that was the case, then I’d expect the service from Apple to work in the same/similar way to how Amazon Music UltraHD works, where their audio will fallback to lossy if there are bandwidth issues detected.

Ken, a lot of your last message is technically beyond my comprehension. My up/down speed is about 100mbs fibre

 My primary is a “One” and I have two Moves

 The rest of the questions I have no idea.

 This should work out of the box. Plug it in, detect and add Sonos devices and add music players and off you go. We shouldn’t need any knowledge of net or local, meshes, DHCP etc etc. It’s consumer kit and not high end and should be plug and play. If Sonos can no longer support AM or any other player reliably, they should tell us and we’ll either move to another service or buy kit that can.

 I’ve spent hours reading up on how to get my kit working. Resetting, updating, swapping speakers around, changing channels, changing WiFi frequencies, sitting on the phone etc but my very basic Sonos system on my home WiFi setup just doesn’t work reliably. The bugging thing is that it worked before the new app. Nothing has changed with my WiFi kit or ISP. Speakers are in exactly the same places. No new kit on the network so I’m assuming that Sonos has done something different? I use AM, Spotify and Amazon to stream and none of them work reliably anymore. Sonos Radio and Tunein work fine.