Is this just after you open the Sonos App? If so, the App needs a short time to discover/rediscover your devices across the wired/wireless LAN and you perhaps just need to give things a little longer to find and connect to your speakers for playback.

Perhaps just see if waiting say another 15 - 20 seconds, or so, resolves the latency issue, or maybe try a different wireless/WiFi channel (use channel 1, 6 or 11 with a channel width of 20Mhz only if that’s practicable/available in your router settings).

I sometimes might move the volume slider now and again just to make sure the speaker I’m about to use has been discovered and is ready to play my chosen audio source.

Cheers mate, I’ll give that a try….. also I don’t know if it does it for the other stations like the BBC ones or the Talksport one or if it’s just the Planet Rock one.

I need to do a bit more investigation I think.

I have worked out one of the “issues” I was getting :-

These radio station that now require the plugin to work (BBC, PlanetRock etc) - if you select to play one them and it starts playing, but you press Stop before it has loaded the show and track information, then it gives the “unable to play” error. You need to wait until it has fully loaded before pressing stop in my experience.

I haven’t had the chance to try out the issue that I originally reported in this thread yet but will be doing so over the coming weeks.

In the meantime, yesterday I did a full reset of all my network system because I do remember a few weeks ago the wifi side of my system went down and I had to reset the router. So this time I turned absolutely everything off and started them up in the proper order as specified by the experts in these forums.

It’s done it again in the lounge tonight. 

Once again it’s Planet Rock and i last used it about 24 hours ago. Tried to play it just now and it just keeps coming back with unable to play - can’t find planet rock. I then I have to select it again from My Sonos for it to play.

Going to try the same with the BBC Sounds plugin to see if that has the same issue.

Do you perhaps have another mobile controller device you can maybe try too, just to see if another mobile device on the network has the same issue? 

I’ve already tried it with both my Android phone and my iPad Pro.

What is the network setup you have, is it a central based WiFi router, or a mesh WiFi? Any other wireless access points, extenders or powerline adapters? Is the router using separate SSID’s for the 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz bands and do you know what channel-width you are using for the 2.4GHz band?

I’m just using a Virgin Superhub 3 in standard configuration.

I tried the same experiment with the Kitchen zone and Planet Rock and it gives the same error there as well as the Lounge zone if left for some time without playing it. It doesn’t seem to have this issues with tunein radio stations though. I will try the BBC sounds stations tomorrow to see if they have the same issue as Planet Rock.

The error it comes up with is cannot play Planet Rock - station not found.

I don’t believe it to be a network issue as I don’t get this same error with normal radio stations using tunein for example.

Okay, my thoughts were it might be some kind discovery/interference issue, but if it’s working for everything else, then that likely rules it out. You might be best to gather your diagnostic report references and speak with Sonos Support Staff via this LINK and see what the reports are showing.

Cheers for your replies much appreciated. I will try the BBC stations tomorrow and check to see if it’s just limited to Planet Rock before contacting support.

Can you just confirm that you’re accessing it via Planet Radio (see my iPad screenshot). Reason I ask is I’m in the UK too and will happily test it here for you aswell. It does start okay for me when selected, but I will just leave it for a while on pause and see what happens. Do you re-start it by selecting the Station ‘direct’ again, or as a shortcut favourite in the ‘My Sonos’ tab after pausing?

I assume the connection times-out on the ‘now playing’ screen after a certain period of time?

Yes that is what I’m using. 

The error occurs if the station is already selected for the zone and hasn’t been used for some time. I then go to the System tab in the app and press play if that zone is already selected or I select the zone and press play if not. So I don’t select the station again, I just select play again because the station is already there for that zone.

When the error occurs it seems to come up with the error quite quickly and I don’t see the same egg timer I see when I select the station from My Sonos. The error remains on screen for a short while then goes away. No matter how many times I press play, it won’t play the station.

If I select the station again from My Sonos it always works.

Hope that makes sense?

Yes, that makes sense, I suspect it maybe something that the Radio Station may do (perhaps?) at their end. That is, after a time, they likely terminate the non-playing session and when you try to restart it, it won’t let you, because the SessionID has been terminated by them, but let me have a play/test here and I will see if I can reproduce the issue.

It will at least show its not an issue with your network/setup if I am able to reproduce it too, but it maybe ‘by design’. If it is ‘by design’, you may have to restart your session from the station in the music services tab, or from a shortcut added to the My Sonos tab instead, both of which will likely create a new session ID. Anyhow let’s see what happens in my case.

Do you have an approximate period of time after pausing the station, when you then encounter the issue? 

Not sure to be honest but 24 hours should definitely cause the problem to happen.

Thanks once again.

No problem, happy to try to assist. I have just paused the Station and will try it in the morning and will see what happens and report back.

Just to mention I haven’t forgot this issue here, but by accident (on my part) I selected the station this morning, rather than the play/pause button from the system tab and whilst that worked with no issue  that’s not what I set out to test, so I’ve just left the station in pause mode again and will test things once again later today.

I’m not sure how many hours it needs before the error occurs but about an hour ago I tried Planet Rock in the Kitchen and it failed. That had been left in pause mode since my posts last night. I then tried BBC radio 6 from the sounds plugin in the lounge and that played OK (this had been in pause mode the same length of time)

Interestingly, the problem never happens on the Roam. This gets hard powered down and only switched on when I have a bath, so probably 3 to 5 days powered down. I’ve just had a bath and turned the Roam on and Planet Rock was displayed in pause mode and when I pressed Play it seemed to load it like it does from the My Sonos tab and as usual it worked OK on the Roam. It has never failed on the Roam leading me to think that it might be starting the station up differently to the speakers that are always powered on?

@JohnG666,
Yes, I have just managed to reproduce the issue, see screenshot attached:

Diagnostic Report: 777327101

The question is whether or not the session ends ‘by design’ I guess? So maybe speak with support through the link provided earlier and perhaps see what they say.

Excellent thanks very much for confirming this. It’s nice to know that it’s not just a problem with my system

I did try several times to re-start the station, but no joy from the play/pause button, but a new session did start when re-selecting the station again from within the Planet Radio service in the music services tab.

Yes that’s exactly the same behaviour I see. Once it’s failed, it will not start using the play/pause button and you have to reselect the station.

I’ve had an online chat with support but they wouldn’t discuss your submitted diagnostic and wanted me to change things on my router which I’m not prepared to do whilst I have everything else working fine!

I was asked to change :- DNS Primary 8.8.8.8 - Secondary 8.8.4.4

Also they said it would need some live diagnostics when the error is occuring to which I replied that it should be straightforward for them to create the error themselves :)

I will go change my router DNS settings to the Google public servers mentioned in your post and see in the coming days what difference it may make. Seems sensible to first try that, I guess.

So do I take it that mine will be set to Virgin DNS Servers?

Because the person didn’t explain why and what the new settings were, I was reluctant to change my settings!

Actually I just read something on the Virgin forums saying that the Hub3 has no facility to allow you to change the DNS servers!