Audio glitches with Youtube Music via the Sonos App?

What I find strange is that I haven’t heard sporadic glitches like this since the days of CD rips and mp3 downloads via dial-up internet. Error correction works well enough these days that corrupt transfers are uncommon, so the worst that happens when the network is bad is that the audio pauses until the buffer can refill enough to resume.

Another strange thing is that when I hear a glitch and then skip back to a few seconds before it and replay, I don’t hear it the second time.

Yet another strange thing is that I’m pretty sure I hear at least one glitch in every track, but never two in a short time, so it’s not frequent enough to be super obvious. For weeks I wondered whether my ears were mistaken until I came across this thread.

Maybe YTM won’t allow tracks to be streamed in perfect fidelity via third party software because they can’t guarantee it won’t be copied, so they add minimally invasive glitches to each one. It sounds a bit ridiculous, but when was the last time anyone heard glitches like this on any streaming music platform?

Ah that makes sense; I had assumed it was Sonos that had to build the integration against a Youtube API, not vice versa.

In that case, seems better to take this to the YTM support forum.

But given that YTM still needs a lot of work to catch up with competing music platforms, I’d guess fixing this would be low priority.

The odd thing is that when it was Google Music, it worked well. It was only when they switched over to YTM that things became troublesome. I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions. 

This idea is plausible, my experience with the glitches is the same as yours (I’m a network engineer and understand that this is not a connection / network issue)

Man - I’m so glad I found this thread.  I love YTM - because I also get AdFree YouTube streaming for me and my son.  Awesome deal.   

I managed to record the glitch.  Is this what everyone is hearing?

Thanks for taking the time to make this!

This is really interesting because my glitches are totally different. One sounds like a click and another sounds like the volume was lowered for a split second but you can still hear the audio.

Here’s a recording of each:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/10IkxX60opuVGJ53J8NkWz8DKAFfSrIdN

I went ahead and started a thread on the YTM side: https://support.google.com/youtubemusic/thread/104742971

Let’s try getting some attention on that side by upvoting and adding any new details :)

This audio glitch has made YTM totally unlistenable through Sonos for me. It’s a shame because I’ve been using Google Play Music through Sonos for a very long time and it always worked great until the forced switchover to YTM. The audio glitch for me is like fingernails on a chalkboard. Extremely harsh irritating sound, especially at volume. It happens at least once per song, but often more. For some reason I’ve been naively thinking they’d fix it, but I guess I’ll just have to switch streaming services. Here’s demo of what I hear (at 2 sec):

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xkgOHdxDee8W6C32xyvoM5xaewREDA7I/view?usp=sharing

I am also experiencing this exact same problem since switching over to YouTube music, there are a number of threads on this subject so there is a definite issue - sonos support have been absolutely useless on this and despite me sending them these threads refuse to acknowledge them or provide further information.

Glad I’m not alone.

I used this “Email the CEO option” on the SONOS support page and was connected with someone from the SONOS team.  Spent 30 minutes on the phone. I sent him the recording with the Chirping sound and provided more insights.  He never got back to me (Three weeks and counting).

I guess we are on our own with this one :-|

Btw - I rebooted my Google Wifi routers and the problem went away for a few days. But now it’s back and it looks like the chirping is more frequent. 

I don’t have internet issues. I have Sonic 1GB Fiber internet.  It’s the most reliable network I ever had.

It’s not very likely to be in between your router and the source (your 1GB Fiber connection) but much more likely to be internal to your local network, either wired, SonosNet of wifi. Or, it could potentially be the servers at YTM sending a data interruption down. But it’s happening across a pretty wide variety of people, so it’s not terribly likely to be the pipe size. 

Sonos is, however, more sensitive to local issues much more than a standard device. Certainly, like a normal device, there’s a connection from the Sonos to your router to the outside world, but then Sonos also has a connection from the Sonos to your router to your controller device, and also from the Sonos to any and all other Sonos devices in your network. 

I’m happy to hear that someone at Sonos is looking at it. If it’s on their side of things, it will get fixed, although perhaps not as quickly as you’d like. However, if it’s on YTM side of things, Sonos doesn’t have much clout with them (especially given the lawsuits between the two companies) , and it would be up to the YTM engineers to fix. Given the rather poor implementation of the Sonos API that YTM did, it’s hard to think they have a cadre of high performing coders on the issue….but I could be wrong there.