Album Does Not Play Correctly on SONOS

Question

I’m in over my head on this one and am wondering if anyone has encountered anything like this. I’m posting this on this forum because it concerns music that plays correctly on Windows but not on SONOS, although I suspect that it is probably not really a SONOS issue. I’m just hoping that someone more knowledgeable can enlighten me.

I purchased an album from a group’s website - a group from whom I’ve purchased other music in the past without issue - and the album plays correctly on my computer using a Windows music player. But when I copy it to my music server and reindex, only the second track plays correctly on the SONOS. All other tracks clock thru a few seconds of silence before automatically jumping to the next track.

So I looked at the tracks using MP3DIAGS, and there is one thing different about that second track. All other tracks are flagged with the ‘ao’ tag, while the second track is not. Here’s the ‘ao’ explanation:

”Found audio stream in an encoding other than MPEG-1 Layer 3 or MPEG-2 Layer 3. While MP3diags understands such streams, very few tests were run on files containing them (because they are not supposed to be found inside files with the .mp3 extension), so there is a bigger chance of something going wrong while processing them.”

I also noticed that the ‘bit rate’ is different on that second track in its properties. The second track is 320kbps while all other tracks are 384kbps. I checked a discussion forum for MP3DIAGS, but it seems to be dead, and I don’t know who else I would ask about this.

I think I probably need to go back to the group and tell them about the issue, but I’m not sure how to articulate it so they would understand. Or could I possibly just change the file extension to something else that might be acceptable?

Any guidance or advice would be appreciated. Thanks very much for your attention and assistance.

Stanley_4 · Accepted Answer

Losless would be a format like FLAC, a free format easily converted to other formats.

Can't help with Windows programs, others here will likely have good suggestions, these are from my poor memory.

https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9nblggh67r2m?hl=en-US&gl=US

https://handbrake.fr/

RogerWF · Answer

Hi again, and thanks again. Your first link led to Sound Converter, and I used that as it looked easier and more straight-forward. All the music converted to MP3 successfully, the only difference being that - even though I chose the ‘high’ quality output - the resulting ‘bit rate’ is 192kbps. But after reindexing, all the tracks played fine on the SONOS. I will still follow up with the artists, who would presumably like to know about the issue, and perhaps they’ll recreate the files, but in the meantime, I can at least listen to the music I purchased. And I learned something too…Cheers:)

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