Missing tracks from playlists

  • 14 March 2021
  • 4 replies
  • 129 views

I know that this has probably been covered off on here many times but I struggle to find the answer. I have created playlists within the Sonos app by adding favourite tracks from Apple Music. For months everything is fine and now many of the tracks are not able to be played. There are a number of different messages including “no longer available”, “cannot be found” etc. The artwork has disappeared beside each of these tracks. Don’t ant to have to add them all again. Am i missing something??


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4 replies

Userlevel 7
Badge +23

Music service content varies over time as licenses and content change. Sonos playlists simply store a url to the content, so cannot adapt to any content changes.

Instead if you make your playlists on the service itself (Apple Music in your case) then you stand a better chance of them working longer term, as Apple can adjust them as the content changes. Mind you I don’t know that they do this, but they can. Sonos cannot do anything clever with their playlists.

An option to recover your broken playlists is to export your Sonos playlist to SoundIIZ and then import them into Apple Music. Video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzuGaAG10zc

Userlevel 7
Badge +17

Spotify does not seem to update song in playlists. This is what a playlist I made on Spotify looks like in my Sonos app now:


The songs you that are greyed out cannot be played anymore.

Userlevel 7
Badge +23

Spotify does not seem to update song in playlists. This is what a playlist I made on Spotify looks like in my Sonos app now:


The songs you that are greyed out cannot be played anymore.

But are they still on the service somewhere? If their licensing expired, then no amount of magic will bring them back. But if they moved their location in the catalog then a smart service could fix it up.

Userlevel 7
Badge +17

My (somewhat implicit) conclusion was they are not - could not find them with the search function on Spotify. This is what the same playlist looks like on Spotify.