Apple Music playback interrupted saying 'Unable to play - the song is not encoded correctly'

When I worked with Apple on some issues (not music related, mind you), their engineers would never share a timeline with us, either, so it seems like @Corry P is unlikely to provide you an answer that will satisfy you. 

L3 support engineer has been helping me since I emailed the CEO.  He acknowledged that the issue started with 15.2.  But he’s telling me that I’m experienced network issues.  *.  My Orbi network has been stable and unchanged and I use a Sonos Boost.  Translation: they cannot fix the issue and have no clue.  Wondering whether to dump all my Sonos gear, order the Nakamichi Dragon system, and figure how how best to lay music in different rooms. Bluesound?   This sucks.  
 

*Moderator Note: Modified in accordance with the Community Code of Conduct.*

The fact that Sonos would suggest this as a “workaround” (which an off-shore “support” agent also did during a 15+ minute waste of my time phone call just now… Is proof that Sonos people just don’t get it.

This is NOT a workaround… It’s a painstaking way to play a single song, or album… 

It does not allow you to play a Playlist.

Seriously, stop wasting our time and just fix this.

I have this issue too - it’s annoying as I can only use all my sonos speakers for bluetooth streaming from my phone - taking all the sonos benefits away. Annoying as I have 7 Sonos speakers - which are now pretty much pointless. 
 

Hopefully they fix it quickly.

Here’s the best workaround.👇  Sonos blames this 100% on Apple... not sure I believe that.

https://support.sonos.com/en/article/stream-airplay-audio-to-sonos

I’ve been having this issue as well.  Odd, but some songs will play on an album, others give the error.

What I’m seeing is that the songs that cause the error have a cloud status of “Uploaded” while songs that play fine have a cloud status of “Matched”.   You can find the cloud status on your Mac in the Music app - get info on a song and click the File tab.  I have yet to figure out how to force the system to rescan the song and update the status to “Matched” though.

I’ve had to switch over to Amazon Music to search and listen to a particular album that Im unable to play on Apple Music via SONOS.   I don’t understand why this issue is happening. I have so much music that I’ve purchased from Apple and now I can’t listen to it all. 🙁

I just got hit with this problem in a weird way: tried to play the album Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots by The Flaming Lips through the Sonos app and hit the “not encoded correctly” error on about half the tracks.

Works fine through AirPlay and if I search for individual tracks in the Sonos app.

I don’t know what kind of “purity pledge” the software engineers took regarding what will/won’t play via the Sonos app, but this is clearly something Sonos needs to handle rather than pointing fingers. 

This has been going on for 4 months, they know about it but yet do nothing except wait for Apple to fix it later this year apparently. The only real workaround is to attach an older sonos speaker (play 1, 3, older 5, and old amp or connect to your group. You can mute them if you don't need sound from them, then hit play and all your Apple music will play as before regardless of upload/match status. If you happened to have “upgraded” all your equipment you are out of luck. 

The only way I can avoid this issue is run my playlist through my Playbar and then join to my other speakers.  Which, is a completely clunky way at best to resolve this as it doesn’t work when my wife is trying to watch tv in the living room where the Playbar is.  I have a literal lifetime of music in Apple and this issue really hampers the ability to play my music anywhere in my house which is why I went with the system.  Sonos seriously needs to address this issue.