Something that I have found frustrating about playback of FLAC encoded files (on a local media server) is that playback can be very inconsistent, and it’s often not obvious why.
After a bit of investigation, it seems that one reason is that the track can be encoded in a way that Sonos doesn’t support, and yet the system tries to play it anyway. The example I have here is OK (2-channel, 44.1kHz) except for one parameter: it is encoded at a bit-depth of 32, while Sonos only officially supports up to 16 bit-depth.
The problem is that the track plays OK for about 2 minutes and then just stops playing. Oddly other tracks from the same album - also encoded with bit-depth of 32 - play fine to the end. If I re-encode the problem track with bit-depth of 16, it plays OK to the end.
My request is this: the bit depth is readable in the track metadata before playback even starts. Please can we have tighter enforcement so that the system simply refuses to play a track if it is not in a supported format? IMO it is preferable for the system to do this (and, critically, to return an appropriate error message) than to try to play it and fail (with no error message).