Unable to play song ‘song’ - the song is not encoded correctly. Issue since 15.2

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!

Thanks for all the suggestions above. Adding an old Play 1 to the group seems to be a temporary workaround for me, but it’s difficult to call it any more than a workaround, as who wants to have their entire Sonos customer experience ruined by having to add a Play 1 to the group every time you want to listen to your Apple music collection which has been built over a 15+ year period.

It’s difficult to call it anything other than a Sonos problem if there’s a workaround to get it working with older formats/devices. I’d be happy if the Sonos engineers just ‘auto-swapped’ to the legacy format when it runs into the issue, as they are requesting the tracks from Apple Music. My experience is that it will just jump to the next song (in a Playlist) until it eventually gives up after finding about five unplayable tracks—not exactly the user experience Sonos wants its customers to be getting during their usage of its otherwise great technology. 

So if you’re listening Sonos—and you should be—then give your engineers a nudge and tell them when this happens to auto-retry with a format request to Apple Music that does work with your Play 1 devices, rather than give up. This doesn’t feel like a difficult fix or a big ask, but you’re losing the loyalty of your most precious asset, your existing customers!

Thanks for listening.

It’s clear that with a new Sonos 2 app in the pipeline they had no intention of fixing this problem. Glad I didn’t fall for updating to this ‘new’ app. There is a thread on this forum with some very annoyed people who have now got all manner of problems much worse than this one! It seems Sonos really don’t give a jot about their customers…

Unfortunately, I have my iPhones and iPads set to auto update all apps.  That was a mistake in the case of Sonos.  The new app is awful.  It’s a horrible user interface, and it did nothing to fix this issue with Apple Music and “not encoded properly” error (which for a brief moment I hoped would be its saving grace).

It leaves me between a rock and a hard place because a significant portion of my Apple Music library won’t play via Apple Music in the Sonos app because of this “DRM issue”, and I cannot reliably stream music from my local library on my NAS because music will randomly just stop playing from time to time (it will play fine and suddenly there’s no music even though the Sonos app shows that the song is still playing).  I’ve followed all of the steps provided by Sonos to but my speakers on dedicated, static IP addresses; but I still get this occasional skipping.