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M Walter
Trending Lyricist I
October 15, 2014

unable to play - server cannot be found

  • October 15, 2014
  • 41 replies
  • 50505 views
Once again it appears that Sonos has lost connectivity to my music server. I use the Sonos bridge together with a Sonos 5 player and multiple Sonos player apps on PC, Android and the Sonos controller.

Along with not being able to see album art, clicking play on either my Sonos controller or in the Sonos PC app results in a notification to the effect of "Unable to play '<music title>' - cannot connect to //<myserver>/<share> because the server cannot be found."

I'm getting pretty tired and angry about doing the routine to shutting down all devices including my router and then restarting in the order of router, bridge, Sonos 5 device.

I've submitted diagnostic log 4072501.
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    41 replies

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    Michael J Kester
    Lyricist I
    April 18, 2015
    Can you try to remove and re-add the share to Sonos? Let me know how it goes, thanks.

    i agree, my Sonos was a complete waste of money, it is absolutely ridiculous and stupid for me to even try to consider the amount of time that I spent wasted trying to fix this stupid problem.  Sonos, go ahead and laugh, you got my money but i will make dam sure that none of my friends make the same mistake i made and buy one of these paper weights
      Scott Danielson
      Lyricist I
      May 7, 2015
      Can you try to remove and re-add the share to Sonos? Let me know how it goes, thanks.

      what is going on at Sonos. I have invested heavily in this system and it just doesn't work!!!
        M WalterAuthor
        Trending Lyricist I
        May 8, 2015
        Can you try to remove and re-add the share to Sonos? Let me know how it goes, thanks.

        Scott, are you using a VPN on the computer hosting your music library?  That turned out to be my problem. Took me a long time to hunt down because at least with my system (Win 8.1), the fact that my VPN was still connected isn't obvious.
        User276765
        Lyricist II
        May 10, 2015
        Guys, are any of you Mac users?  Sonos customer services were great and helped sort this out:

        They said that with the last Mac update it's affected Sonos as it renamed the Mac and the new name was too long.  

        You have to rename it in 2 places: WINS in Network Preferences/advanced and also under Sharing. It then connected perfectly and remedied the issue.

        Hope this helps.
        MD_670753
        Lyricist III
        June 10, 2015
        In the last few days I spent some time creating playlists in sonos that fetch flac files from a library on a windows 7 machine on my wired gigabit LAN (with wifi for phones / tablets). I quickly ran into the error that the OP here experienced. My iPad would frequently throw a "Unable to play '<music title>' - cannot connect to //<myserver>/<share> because the server cannot be found."

        On trying to figure out if it was a DNS or other broader network issue I (pretty much accidentally) stumbled across something unexpected about the machine that the files are stored on. From the command prompt on the windows box I initiated a ping of itself (that was the accidentally bit, my morning cofee hadnt kicked in). To my surprise, the ping command showed an IPv6 address and 4 successful pings returned in good time. I do not run IPv6 on my network and thought that I had turned IPv6 off for that network card. I have now turned off IPv6 and restarted a few things such as the DNS server and have been able to play music and force library rescans without issue.

        It has only been about 5 hours since I made this change so I may be jumping the gun but its about 4 hours more than what I was able to get previously. I hope this may assist others. It is my understanding that Sonos does not support IPv6 (only IPv4) and if people are trouble-shooting their networks, checking that IPV6 is disabled should only be a good thing.  

        MD
        CosmoNerd
        Enthusiast II
        June 10, 2015
        Its likely a NetBIOS issue which only supports device names with max 15 characters.
        Likely renaming the PC and removing/adding the music library in the Sonos controller pointing tho the new device name will be the fix.
        -Cheers
        MD_670753
        Lyricist III
        June 10, 2015
        Its likely a NetBIOS issue which only supports device names with max 15 characters.
        Likely renaming the PC and removing/adding the music library in the Sonos controller pointing tho the new device name will be the fix.


        Machine name is HTPC5
        Ricardo Sono
        Lyricist I
        April 10, 2016
        Sonos Customer Service helped me figure out that I had a bad cable between my router and bridge.  
        Hi guys, I'm a Mac user and I just thought I'd let you know that Sonos customer services were great and helped sort this out. They said that with the last Mac update, it's affected Sonos, renamed the Mac and the new name was too long.

        We renamed it in 2 places: WINS in Network Preferences/advanced and also under Sharing. It then connected perfectly and remedied the issue. Hope this helps.


        Thank you for this solution. Spent an hour trying to figure out what was going on, read this post and fixed it in under 1 minute!
        cmalgratjr
        Lyricist I
        November 3, 2017
        Once again it appears that Sonos has lost connectivity to my music server. I use the Sonos bridge together with a Sonos 5 player and multiple Sonos player apps on PC, Android and the Sonos controller.

        Along with not being able to see album art, clicking play on either my Sonos controller or in the Sonos PC app results in a notification to the effect of "Unable to play '<music title>' - cannot connect to //<myserver>/<share> because the server cannot be found."

        I'm getting pretty tired and angry about doing the routine to shutting down all devices including my router and then restarting in the order of router, bridge, Sonos 5 device.

        I've submitted diagnostic log 4072501.
        cmalgratjr
        Lyricist I
        November 3, 2017
        Don’t know if you found this out yet, but you can eliminate the computer as the middle man in this equation. For IPhone users, Google how to connect Sonos to Apple ITunes and it becomes a straight forward process. I imagine you can look up how to connect out music sources to Android phones.
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