Unable to play songs on computer; no way to dismiss endless complaints

@controlav is correct - this has all the symptoms of the PC not being available for some reason. I used to have exactly the same problem when I allowed my NAS devices to spin down to save power. The software on the phone wakes up, starts playing the queue and then fails very quickly on every item in the queue as the files aren’t available. My desktop PC is often on all the time but it powers down the disks after a time, so wouldn’t be available.

I ended up just setting my Sonos NAS so that it never spins down the disk, and it now works perfectly every time. That, plus reserving IPs for all Sonos kit, plus ignoring Sonos advice re EoP adaptors has left me with a very reliable system.

re: disk asleep .. I’ll give this a try, but the typical scenario is that it starts playing some songs OK from the PC (so the disk is spinning), then goes into this frantic “Unable to play”. This is i believe related to shuffle where it seems to simply overwhelm itself .. SONOS is seeking faster than the PC can respond? .. at some point it gets caught up. It’s not the songs themselves. I can and do play these songs. I’m going to try the disk time-out approach, i don’t think that’s it for the reasons I’ve stated. What I might do is simply avoid use of the shuffle function (which is too bad; I like to shuffle the songs on my computer).

Anyway thanks for the brainstorming.

So on re-reading this on a larger screen, I find this interesting:

#1 error:
Unable to play 'Let Me Be' - the connection to //DESKTOP-GK1OO5A/Music was lost.

#2 error:

Unable to play '11 Young At Heart.wma' - the file //DESKTOP-GK1OO5A/Music/Victoria Williams/Water To Drink/11 Young At Heart.wma cannot be found

And then every other error is “cannot be found”.

The first error is “connection lost”, which would imply that the PC fell off the network, or the SonosLibraryService process crashed. Do you have another PC on this network? If so when this happens again, from this other PC try ping desktop-gk1oo5a (to see if it is still on the network) and if that works then try net view \\desktop-gk1oo5a to see if the music share is alive. Also use TaskMgr to see if SonosLibraryService.exe is still running on the problem PC.

Today’s experiment: on the VERY COMPUTER WHERE THE MUSIC RESIDES, try to shuffle across my library ON THAT COMPUTER. Results … skipped songs, starts and stops, …

Error log

Monday, November 30, 2020 - 3:37 PM Central Time
Unable to browse music

Monday, November 30, 2020 - 3:38 PM Central Time
Unable to play '02 Gone Country.wma' - network connection speed insufficient to maintain playback buffer.

Monday, November 30, 2020 - 3:38 PM Central Time
Unable to play '02 Gone Country.wma' - network connection speed insufficient to maintain playback buffer.

Monday, November 30, 2020 - 3:39 PM Central Time
Unable to play '01 Chattahoochee [Extended Mix].wma' - network connection speed insufficient to maintain playback buffer.

So one computer on a 5G network at 237 mbps (I just clocked it). The Sonos speakers themselves are on the 2G network .. still .. nothing else is running. One person. One house. One story. And I can’t shuffle over my music library from the very computer the music is on.

You seem unsure of how it works - the work is done on the player, not the controller - that simply tells the player what to do. The music on the computer is simply a network resource.

See above re the way that it works

re: the work is done on the player, not the controller

There was discussion that the computer disk was spun down. This eliminated that as a possibility. This also removed one component from the problem, the problem has nothing to do w/ the phone (Samsung Galaxy).

re: Do you have the IP addresses reserved in the router?

I just used the vanilla setup procedure .. if it is using dynamic IP address that’s what I’ve got. Normal Pandora play (shuffling over a station) works find w/ the dynamic IP address setup (which I assume is what Sonos setup uses). If it was related to IP issues I would think the same problem would crop up there as well. The error says “network connection speed insufficient to maintain playback buffer” and this only happens when shuffling across a large number of songs on the PC. The IP address may factor into this, but don’t see why, and frankly I shouldn’t have to worry about it as a consumer. That’s the “New Product Development Professional certification” in me.

Anyway .. just trying to document this for whoever is interested. I’ll give SONOS a call. My current workaround is simply to crank it up on shuffle -- let it sputter it along w/ faults -- and eventually it gets enough music queued up to play. But if you then skip forward to much, it cough and sputters -- again the buffering issue.

thanks all

Bunches of people report “network connection speed insufficient to maintain playback buffer.”

One guy suggested this, and some folks are saying it worked:

“When a Group is built, the first player is elected as the Group’s “coordinator”. All traffic for the Grouped players flows through this unit. If this unit is on the edge with respect to its wireless connectivity, the Group will suffer. Obviously as the Group grows, problems accelerate. Sometimes building the Group in a different order is helpful. For example if one of the players is wired, make this unit the coordinator..”

This actually makes sense; if the group “coordinator” is located in a distant room w/ poorer connection, that’s going to impact buffering. I don’t have a wired Player, but I do have one very close to the router w/ the best connection. Initial experiment looks promising. I cleared the queue, shuffled over the entire PC w/ no hiccups. I’ll keep this group setup and see what happens.

Formats are mainly a mix of WMA and MP3

Today’s experiment

• done on PC to eliminate phone from the equation
• again group speakers based on strength of wifi connection.
• Clear the queue and SHUFFLE over the 2,000+ songs on the PC -- that worked w/o error
• Now DON’T SKIP just let it play for like over an hour -- again worked without any errors at all

So as I’ve noted before, the act of skipping songs seems to initiate the problem, i suspect because SONOS starts buffering based on initial queue construction, then when you skip (maybe several songs) you get ahead of what it has buffered and it scrambles to catch up.