spotify lost connection with alarms

Question

For about a week my Sonos morning alarm on my One SL speaker between 5 & 6 am fails. When I’m awake I can see in the Sonos app that ‘connection to Spotify was lost’ for each song it attempts to play. I have to go to the Spotify app to play a song first and then I can go back to Sonos to play music from Spotify (either directly or via an alarm again). Every morning same issue - it’s like the backend connection between Sonos and Spotify gets reset or ‘lost’ during the night. My home network is optimal and the speaker has a -59 dBm internet connection - so very good. This just started out of the blue in the past week

Airgetlam · Accepted Answer

This seems odd, yet so familiar, as there seem to be many similar threads.

Have you tried moving your ‘alarms’ by a minute or two, to either side of where they are currently? It’s possible the Spotify server your system is attempting to connect to is being overwhelmed by connection requests by similar alarms.

It’s also possible, that at the moment the alarm is going off, the Sonos is having network issues and is unable to reach the Spotify server, for undefined reasons. I would recommend that you submit a system diagnostic within 10 minutes of experiencing this problem, and call Sonos Support to discuss it. Don’t post the resulting diagnostic number here, they get sensitive about GDPR.

There may be information included in the diagnostic that will help Sonos pinpoint the issue and help you find a solution.

When you speak directly to the Support staff, they have tools at their disposal that will allow them to give you advice specific to your network and Sonos system.

JLetch · Answer

So after many weeks analysis I worked out exactly what the problem was with some help from Sonos Support - and it has nothing to do with the network. I ended up moving the speaker right next to the router and was able to replicate the exact issue with absolutely no chance of a network issue. The problem comes down to how Sonos caches Spotify playlist information for alarms and a likely bug between how Spotify and Sonos integrate.

In order to play an alarm on your Sonos speaker you have to select a Sonos Chime, Sonos Favorites Playlist or Sonos Favorites Station. There is no option to directly select a Spotify playlist (at least not from my Sonos app).

We determined that some playlists played fine with an alarm and others didn’t - generally a brand new alarm with a brand new playlist worked, but older playlists came up with the error. In short the way that Sonos caches information about the Spotify playlist somehow got corrupted and/or lost. So to fix the issue I just had to follow the three step process:

Remove the Spotify playlist as a Sonos Favorite.
Re-add the Spotify playlist as a Sonos Favorite.
In the Alarm section, unselect and re-select the Sonos Favorite (for that Spotify playlist) for that particular alarm.

Why the integration gets corrupted is unclear to me, but you can tell if it is by doing the following:

Select any Spotify playlist that is listed under Sonos Favorites (i.e. you added it at some time in the past).
If the option to “Remove from Sonos Favorites” is not there or the only option is to “Save to Sonos Favorites” despite it already existing in the Sonos Favorites list it means somehow something is corrupt. Just follow the steps above to clean things up.

My recommendation to Sonos would be to periodically refresh Sonos Favorites with Spotify playlist data as well as refresh Sonos Favorites used with set alarms to mitigate this issue on the backend.

Hope this helps someone (assuming dropouts aren’t network related).

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