Since the 15.2 release there is quite a few songs that display this error when trying to play them. These seem to be mainly songs that are not lossless. They were purchased over time from Apple Music. They will still play if I use the Apple Music app, but they will no longer play from Sonos app. I suspect some lossy codex broke with latest release. Occurs with all my Sonos products.
Is this a known issue?
As I’ve posted above, I’ve been dealing with a Level 3 Supervisor at Sonos. His latest comment:
It's definitely an issue on Apple's end. Our content partner team has regularly meetings with major content partners. We track all of these cases that we get, and present that information to Apple. When they will fix it we can't say, because the fix isn't under our control.
Thanks for all the suggestions above. Adding an old Play 1 to the group seems to be a temporary workaround for me, but it’s difficult to call it any more than a workaround, as who wants to have their entire Sonos customer experience ruined by having to add a Play 1 to the group every time you want to listen to your Apple music collection which has been built over a 15+ year period.
It’s difficult to call it anything other than a Sonos problem if there’s a workaround to get it working with older formats/devices. I’d be happy if the Sonos engineers just ‘auto-swapped’ to the legacy format when it runs into the issue, as they are requesting the tracks from Apple Music. My experience is that it will just jump to the next song (in a Playlist) until it eventually gives up after finding about five unplayable tracks—not exactly the user experience Sonos wants its customers to be getting during their usage of its otherwise great technology.
So if you’re listening Sonos—and you should be—then give your engineers a nudge and tell them when this happens to auto-retry with a format request to Apple Music that does work with your Play 1 devices, rather than give up. This doesn’t feel like a difficult fix or a big ask, but you’re losing the loyalty of your most precious asset, your existing customers!
Thanks for listening.
Welp, it’s be at least 9 months and we are all still in hell
Taking my Play:3 out of retirement resolved the issue of Apple Music and playlists getting error messages and not playing. I now start everything I play from Apple Music on my Play:3 (hardwired to my router) then group in other speakers.
This should be a priority for Sonos to resolve on newer speakers.
What makes little sense is that you can delete a song that won't play and then re-download the same song from the same album/source and it will then play just fine. I've noticed that most of not all of the songs I have issues with are my older downloads. Anything I've downloaded over the last few months or anything that came off a CD I own (even if I added that CD long ago) seem just fine.
I am just slowly going through my library and deleting and re-adding the stuff that doesn't play. It is an annoying process, but I am also finding stuff I never listen to and just permanently deleting it lol.
I continue to get this error on Apple Music and YouTube Music.
it happens on single speakers, paired speakers and multi speaker TV setups.
it happens on all 15 of my speakers.
it is ongoing for a couple months with no fix happening.
Same problem here, using Apple Music and version 15.3.
I am using IKEA shortcut buttons for play lists around the house and this no longer works.
To begin with, I thought it was the IKEA hub playing up but when I run the Sonos app, I can see the playlist being cycled though the songs and constantly flagging “wrong encoding”.
To begin with it would cut songs short and skip to the next, but now it is about 90% of the songs in a playlist.
very very frustrating.
was gonna buy 2 x new move - but this problem is driving me mad - seems if its an existing sonos playlist (large one) and even when started from non airplay sonos - skips ‘encode’ incorrectly’ tracks - so re do yr entire playlists then? ffs - this is really not good
Unfortunately, I have my iPhones and iPads set to auto update all apps. That was a mistake in the case of Sonos. The new app is awful. It’s a horrible user interface, and it did nothing to fix this issue with Apple Music and “not encoded properly” error (which for a brief moment I hoped would be its saving grace).
It leaves me between a rock and a hard place because a significant portion of my Apple Music library won’t play via Apple Music in the Sonos app because of this “DRM issue”, and I cannot reliably stream music from my local library on my NAS because music will randomly just stop playing from time to time (it will play fine and suddenly there’s no music even though the Sonos app shows that the song is still playing). I’ve followed all of the steps provided by Sonos to but my speakers on dedicated, static IP addresses; but I still get this occasional skipping.
The way to push is by calling customer service, because these guys from Sonos might not be checking this forum.
yawn this is getting really embarrassing - please sonos get this issue sorted been months and months now
I am having the same issue. Random songs or batches of songs here and there in my VERY extensive Apple Music library. I cannot go through the entire library and delete and reload these songs. It’s simply too much work.
You know where I don’t have a problem is playing music on my HomePod… so strange that Apple is the problem.
The HomePod linked to your AppleID is not a 3rd Party device - it would play your Apple DRM protected tracks anyway, if indeed that is the issue that’s causing these error messages.
I’m not convinced that this is just due to the DRM problem. I have music that has played fine for months that now recently won’t play and gives the same ‘not encoded properly’ error. Very frustrating.
Got it. But if I delete the song from my library, aren’t I deleting the fact that I ever owned it and ripped it and then downloading it back down through the streaming subscription and thus don’t own it if I ever cancel that?
If you perhaps try it in iTunes Music with just one track only to begin with, you will see that you are removing the local copy and then replacing it with a DRM-free copy from the iCloud servers. Simply backup your local copy, if you are concerned.
Once you have tested the process with one track, you can go into delete all those tracks you have held in the iCloud as perhaps one huge batch and similarly remove/download the tracks in one fell swoop.
I recall doing this task some years ago, it was a case of leaving the PC running overnight etc. until all tracks had been replaced. Just to say I used an iTunes Match annual subscription - that was required all those years ago. See link: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT204146
I’m not too sure what the current position is these days, I suspect that add-on annual subscription is no longer needed🤔? …I haven’t used iTunes Match for a good many years.
Hope that assists.
I've been having this issue for the last 2-3 weeks. I use YouTube music (either from my Android phone or Google home assistant). So the problem doesn't seem to be with Apple/iOS...
I ‘think’ there are perhaps also other reasons why the same error message shows aswell, such as occasions when the playing audio buffer empties and the device skips to the next track. So maybe try a different WiFi/SonosNet channel (depending on what your speaker is using) and see if that maybe resolves the issue.
Got it. But if I delete the song from my library, aren’t I deleting the fact that I ever owned it and ripped it and then downloading it back down through the streaming subscription and thus don’t own it if I ever cancel that?
If you perhaps try it in iTunes Music with just one track only to begin with, you will see that you are removing the local copy and then replacing it with a DRM-free copy from the iCloud servers. Simply backup your local copy, if you are concerned.
Once you have tested the process with one track, you can go into delete all those tracks you have held in the iCloud as perhaps one huge batch and similarly remove/download the tracks in one fell swoop.
I recall doing this task some years ago, it was a case of leaving the PC running overnight etc. until all tracks had been replaced. Just to say I used an iTunes Match annual subscription - that was required all those years ago. See link: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT204146
I’m not too sure what the current position is these days, I suspect that add-on annual subscription is no longer needed🤔? …I haven’t used iTunes Match for a good many years.
Hope that assists.
Good point. I think I still have that iTunes Match subscription and, if something goes wrong, I can always restore the “ownership” from my local backup copy like you suggested, I guess.
Still exists
I am in the same situation as everybody here, I have at least over a third of my music bought over the years from Itunes that won’t play on my new Era 100. The Sonos Senior Rep I was in touch with just said “That’s an issue on Apple’s end, so unfortunately we can’t fix it, or it would have been fixed long ago.” Which means that Sonos is NOT working on a solution for this issue and they consider Apple to be responsible. However, all of my music plays flawlessly on Denon, Bose and, of course, an Apple HomePod. So, it’s not an Apple issue. It’s just that Sonos has no intent to work on a solution. My return window with Best Buy has just passed by a few days...I’m just going to try to return this device and buy one of the other brands that doesn’t have this issue. I see that this issue started over 10 months ago, hence it doesn’t seem like Sonos is willing to work on it.
Just adding in- I have been experiencing this issue for a very long time. Appears to happen with “Matched” songs (I originally manually added to iTunes as MP3s).
I have a very large Apple Music Library I’ve been building over 20 years so this is crippling my Sonos experience- super disappointing.
Sonos version 15.5
What happens if you ‘delete’ the local copy of the ‘matched’ song, and then download a fresh copy from Apple? Just as a test….I’m curious, not making a guarantee .
The recent update seemed to improve the streaming consistency
What happens if you ‘delete’ the local copy of the ‘matched’ song, and then download a fresh copy from Apple? Just as a test….I’m curious, not making a guarantee .
It works except I have thousands of songs and you don’t know which ones have the problem because they give you a quick warning then skip. If you delete and add again it fixes it.
hiw can you tell which ones are not coded correctly?
Just select them all and remove them and download the copies from the cloud overnight in the iTunes App… I did it with 25,000+ tracks, albeit that was some years ago with an iTunes Match annual subscription back then …and it took me a couple of days (mostly waiting for it to complete)… but it literally takes minutes to sort within iTunes.
The fact that Wi-Fi interference keeps being mentioned by support after this long of a thread of people seeing the same issue is frustrating. For me, this happens on the exact same songs, every single time. Others work perfectly fine. It’s 100% reproducible in my case.
Well, I did a 30-minute web chat, and was told to call the tech support phone number. I waited on hold for 45 minutes, and was told this is a known issue and Sonos is working with Apple on a fix. No ETA. Frustrating, but at least it seems like it’s documented as a known issue.
Enter your E-mail address. We'll send you an e-mail with instructions to reset your password.
