Spotify Playlist Too Big?

Yeah, and my apologies for the overlong post. But, in short, I feel exactly the same way, and my timeline for this change is pretty much the same as yours. I still don’t know the underlying “why”: i.e. why now, and not before? And is it generally the music services that enforce these limitations, or Sonos? At this point, though, I am pretty much resigned to adapting to workarounds: either doing the work of dividing my large collections into multiple smaller playlists, or using Direct Control/Airplay, etc.

I’ve been digging into this, but I didn’t personally have any Spotify playlists huge enough, so tried playing some public playlists on Spotify / S2 / PC app:

"over 5000 dance pop hits and remixes" fails @10 seconds, as expected, that is the timeout
"1000 different christmas songs" works, and takes 6 seconds

I then took the 1000 playlist and made it one of “my” playlists, and that worked too (took 4 seconds).

I made a “local” version of the 5000 playlist, and that failed, so I debugged it.

It is the ten second timeout in the speakers, when calling to Spotify. My own app uses a 30 second timeout to make the call to load the playlist, and that is NOT expiring, it is the speakers themselves that force this limit.

Just strange this seems to have changed recently. Would this be on the Spotify or the Sonos side?

The Sonos timeout has always been 10 seconds. Spotify’s speed hasn’t changed for me (in the USA) but who knows where the OP is located and what their route is to the Spotify SMAPI server. Maybe the CDN is broken?

For me a ping to spotify-v5.ws.sonos.com (which is the Spotify SMAPI endpoint) is 15ms. A tracert indicates it goes through an Akamai CDN.

So this must be a Spotify thing.

Hi controlav, thanks so much for looking into this. Given your prior post, I decided to take around 585 songs from my main Spotify library and make it into a playlist. My Sonos speakers are able to load this fine. Given this, I find the extensive list of “Music Service Limitations” forwarded to me from a Sonos Support person a bit perplexing.

At this point, I’m getting above my paygrade. I don’t know how to do things like test the ping between me and the Sonos Music API for Spotify. (OP is perhaps in southern California? I’m in Canada.) I may enlist the help of a more capable friend after the holidays.

I don’t want to be too insistent & demanding here, especially since I’m not even the OP, so I’ll phrase my question broadly, knowing that I’ve got some work to do in the coming weeks:

I have many Sonos speakers placed throughout an old three story home with many rooms. I therefore set up a Linksys Velop AX/Wifi 6 Tri-Band mesh network with three nodes and a wired backhaul, in the hopes of having a system more than capable of handling a large, high-demand house. As I investigate this further: for this problem with the 10 second timeout for large playlists in Spotify and Apple Music, should looking at the health & functioning of my home network be a first step? Or is this more likely an issue that exists somewhere in the world between me and these SMAPI endpoints?

Based on my debugging I see nothing that indicates issues with anyone’s local network. The 10 second timeout fires because of the time taken for speaker->internet->CDN->spotify and back, and there is little you can do for any of those steps.

There has been some other change in the way the Sonos deals with Amazon playlists that has changed recently.  If I go to “Amazon”, My Music”, then “Tracks” all are organized alphabetically.  It used to be that if I scrolled down I could start to shuffle songs from anywhere in the playlist.  Now I cannot play anything beyond the 500th track, and I get the same “An error occurred while adding tracks to the queue (701)” message that others have talked about.  Not that I know a lot, but that does not seem to be a timing issue, it seems to be some new limit applied.  

Dear Sonos, can you please do something to maximize the amount of tracks from our various music services.

So I have been taking a deep look at this issue for the last few weeks, and have made changes to my own Windows app to handle these large playlists. It was frankly trickier than I had expected, but its all working now.

With the “normal” method, the app makes a single call to the Coordinator speaker and hands it the playlist details. The speaker then makes a single call to the music service to get all of the items and adds them to the queue. This all must be completed in less than 10 seconds, which is not possible for Spotify playlists containg 1000 or so items (as both the app->speaker and speaker->service calls are both limited to 10 seconds).

Instead I tried adding them using “pagination” - the app grabs the playlist contents 500 at a time, then adds each item in much smaller chunks to the Coordinator’s queue. This works, but is a LOT slower than the “normal” method. The 1000 item Spotify playlist that I have mostly been testing with takes a couple of minutes to load this way, and frankly I don’t see any way of making that any faster. But it does work. And once it does, you can then immediately create a Sonos playlist of the exact same tracks and use that in future, which loads almost instantly of course.

I have some more testing to do before releasing my updated app, but I am happy the concept works even within the time limits imposed by the Sonos and Spotify implementations.

I will try that. Thanks