Hi @Buster63,

Have you recently upgraded your Amazon Music account to Amazon Music HD? If so, we’re aware of an issue affecting playlists on accounts that have accepted the HD upgrade, causing them to fail to play with a “not encoded correctly” error message.

Unfortunately, the only workarounds we’re aware of are to recreate the playlists manually - either as a Sonos playlist in the Sonos app, or natively on Amazon Music through their app or website.

If you haven’t upgraded to HD, please let me know.

James, thanks for your reply, disappointing though it is. I’d really expected a better option, from a company with Sonos’ reputation, than ‘start again’. That will take us a long time. 
 

For information we haven’t upgraded to HD, the account is the same as its always been for the last few years. 

Thanks for that information.

To be sure, I’d ask that you check your Amazon Music account online, to see if your account is actually opted in to HD. For context, Amazon have started providing upgrades to their HD service free of charge, so it’s completely possible that you haven’t noticed such a change. 

To check your account, go to https://music.amazon.co.uk/, sign in to the same account that you have added on Sonos, and click the gear wheel at the top right. If the blue text above your name says “Amazon Music HD” (as mine does in the screenshot below), then you indeed have upgraded to the new service.

I understand that it’s disappointing to have to re-create playlists, but we have seen some success in certain cases where Amazon can remove the HD upgrade for you, and your playlists will become functional again. You would need to contact Amazon Support for this. 

If your account type is truly not Amazon Music HD, I suggest contacting our customer care team for some live troubleshooting, so they can investigate your issue further.

I’m not sure this issue is affecting only SONOS devices or software.   The past day or so, I have run into the issue using Amazon music in both my office and car while using the Amazon Music PC and iPhone apps.  SONOS speakers were not being used in either situation.

Good afternoon,

I too am having this problem and it was since I did the last Sonos update several days ago. I have Amazon HD, but the only thing that changed was the update!!

I’ve successfully used Amazon HD for the last 4 or 5 months. I’ve a paired set of Play 3’s, a Play 3, a Play 1 and Connect. A few days ago playback started juddering and was unlistenable. From looking online, Amazon appear to have switched everyone at that time who are on Amazon Music to HD and Ultra HD. I’m guessing the problem is being caused by the Ultra HD bit, which Sonos can’t cope with. (or play?). Any idea whether I can change my Amazon Music service to HD only, or Sonos can begin to cope with Ultra HD.

i appreciate I’m making a lot of assumptions here. 

I follow many of your assumptions, with one caveat. I’d expect it’s actually the local network that is having trouble with the additional bandwidth required for either HD or Ultra HD. While not a fool proof test, you could probably check by simply wiring all Sonos speakers directly to the router. That would eliminate WiFi interference, but wouldn’t necessarily resolve either any potential duplicate IP address, DNS address, or server issues on Amazon’s part. 
 

Networking is hard :(

I think this the problem is two fold. 

Amazon Music is now automatically trying to stream an Ultra HD version of a track if it has it. My system (as in previous but one post!) could play the HD versions in all speaker combos, or individually. This article:    https://www.techhive.com/article/3632860/sonos-speakers-to-support-amazon-music-hd.html  says that the (my!) Play 1’s and 3’s don’t support Ultra HD, although they do support HD.

If Amazon (or Sonos) could separate the HD and Ultra HD service, I think that would solve my problem. 

I’m having the same problem with two other streaming services, namely Qobuz and Spotify. With Spotify the issue is with playlists I have created in the Spotify app, played through Sonos app; with Qobuz (very disturbingly) it is with albums that I play from Qobuz through the Sonos app. I don’t have the same issue if I play the lists using airplay directly from the Spotify and Qobuz apps. This is an issue that has started in the past couple of weeks. I agree with one of the previous commenters that this is extremely disappointing and I would expect more from Sonos.