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

gawd this apple music x itunes match x sonos x spatial nonsense is getting me depressed… no matter what i try i cant get all tracks to play from my extensive itunes match tracks…. ‘use older speaker first’, ‘play direct from search’ nope nothing works… have just got move 2 - will see if that newer hardware works but my suspicion this is apple x dolby spatial x sonos problem and will take some time while the blame game continues and well lets face it its a small % of us with extensive itunes match catalogues - shame liked sonos but its got bloated and no one take responsibility…. sigh been here since 2007…. maybe its time to leave and sell get a different solution….  

This is where frustration takes you……..to look for something else.

I notice sonos have buddied up with Deezer, hopefully this will guarantee at least one streaming service will work flawlessly.

Sonos is indeed now bloated, maybe they should of developed sonosnet, and their own routers to tie reliability in, instead of adding airplay, bluetooth. The main flaw is they rely on everybody else to stream and have no control.

We have 3 play:1’s (and a roam) and this is still an issue. I wouldn’t normally comment here but ended up googling for a fix after way too many months of frustration, and see the suggestion is to add a play:1, so just wanted to chime in that it is not likely to be a magical fix. 
 

I’m not sure who is to blame here but right now I see two choices for our house. 
 

1. buy apple/other speakers
2. swap to Spotify (entire family has to switch)
3. buy newer Sonos speakers

Option 3 doesn’t sound like it would help except for giving me AirPlay. Based on other comments here the Spotify solution is also hit/miss (teenage daughter would love the swap, wife and I probably prefer to stay Apple bound), though I sometimes use my free account there without problems. 
 

I feel my only real option is 1. And by going with HomePods I’m securing much better support since if there is one thing Apple will focus on it’s their own service. 

I basically do not understand why tf Sonos hasn’t prioritised this, because I can’t be the only one with this kind of sentiment. And it gets worse every time they pop up another ad in my system for discounts. Screw that!! 

Just 2 days ago I purchased a Beam (Gen 2) which is my first Sonos device and have noticed that several of my playlists suffer from the “Unable to play song … song not encoded correctly.” error.  As with others I can use Airplay 2 to stream songs to the Beam without any issues (so far).

I’m seeing a bunch of folks in this thread who are unhappy with Sonos.  Being new to Sonos I will say that this could very well be an issue with Apple.  I purchased the Beam because the pair of Apple HomePod Minis I had been using suffered from a problem that looks and feels like this same issue. The HPs worked for 9 months just fine but then all of a sudden things went belly up in August.  Since then I had been working with Apple support having worked with them to make sure my network was not the source of the issue, I rebooted, reset, and eventually submitted system diagnostics to engineering and nothing was identified.

So with my HPs when streaming playlists (by speaking to them) I would have the stream stop & restart, or simply stop altogether.  I then started to observe the songs being played using the Home app on iOS.  In the Home app I found I could frequently scrub the timeline back 10-20 seconds and the song would restart and then complete playing the song.  I also could observe multiple songs being skipped.  Of course Apple doesn’t provide any sort of messaging/logging to give users a clue as to what the issue might be (at least the Sonos app provides a clue about an issue).  The HomePods would also seem to lose my credentials occasionally and I would be forced to reconnect the HPs to my AppleID.  So if the music is encrypted in transit from Apple and the HPs lose my credentials then the Music would not be decryptable and so perhaps would appear to be improperly encoded??? (pulling this out of very thin air).

Also FYI, the songs I have seen that are having this issue are songs that are listed as being Matched using iTunes Match but I am not sure why that matters.  It is my understanding that when I am playing the songs from the Sonos S2 app that these songs are streamed from Apple’s servers not from my iPhone and being matched they are Apple’s DRM free versions of the songs.  

If the songs were “Uploaded” by iTunes Match then they would be my original songs and perhaps they would have issues.

I’ll be digging into this more moving forward.  If I find something new I’ll add the info to this thread.

@AgingKeeper,

To play your own ‘matched’ songs on other devices I’ve always thought you needed an iTunes Match annual subscription as mentioned here…

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204146

That annual only subscription used to allow users to also convert their DRM encoded tracks to DRM-Free tracks. I recall subscribing many (many) years ago to convert my entire local iTunes library. I think back then it used to cost around £17-£18 (or less) per year on top of any other monthly subscription. 

I’m not entirely sure what the position is nowadays as it seems a few things have long since changed at Apple.

Maybe these things though are connected to the issue you’re seeing, er.. perhaps🤔?

I don’t want to come across the wrong way but people really need to read the entire thread. The oh it might be interference, please turn off everything there turn it… it might be apple’s issue. Come on people! Sonos has admitted the issue! They told you to add an old unit to the group and then Apple Music will play the way it used to.  Why is this so hard for people to understand it has only been going on for almost an entire YEAR!

The only question that really needs to be answered is why we have all put up with this for a year?

Derrick,

To answer your question: I am putting up with this because I still want to use Apple Music and while not the best option (for me), being able to Airplay to my only Sonos device still does enough for me.  I am altering how I use Apple Music to fit with the hardware I have (as I used to do).

Your assumptions have a few wholes about the people participating in or simply reading this thread.  

1. In my case Sonos’s responses do not work for me.  I have one device and it is new.  I also do not want to continually search for tracks to play (that does work!).
2. Also your assertion that Sonos has admitted the issue misses the point.  Cory P states that Sonos are “aware of an issue” and then follows this with “Apple are working on a resolution”. Not sure what you are thinking but to me it can’t be much clearer.  The problem is with Apple Music not with Sonos.  

Since this thread has been going for a while I added a post saying that Apple’s own HomePods are still (as of a month or so ago) not working properly.  In fact, I purchased the Sonos Beam because I was done with Apple’s HomePods.  The hardware is “fragile” and the software doesn’t work.  My intent with my post was to say this issue doesn’t appear to be something that will be solved for Sonos users soon.  

One last option is to stop using Apple Music. 

Hope you are feeling better after venting, life is too short to hold it all in!

I found a solution that seems to work.  As mentioned before, you can search in the Sonos app for the artist/album/song and play that way instead of going to your Library.  Or the fix I discovered consists of the following steps on my Mac.

Go into the Music app and:

1 - Right click on the artist or album and Remove Download

2 - Right click and Download again

3 - Find the artist/album folder in iTunes -> iTunes Media -> Music

4 - Copy the album folder somewhere else temporarily

5 - Back in the Music app, right click the artist/album and Delete from Library

6 - Go to File → Import to Re-import from the previously copied folder

7 - After it has synced with iCloud (will show down arrows for each song, may take several minutes) test in Sonos to see if it plays now

8 - Delete the copied album folder

Hope this helps!

OK so the new app means you don’t get the error message but the songs still don’t play. However just by accident I discovered that if I ask Alexa to play these songs (set up with Apple Music) it does play on Sonos ??? Very strange !