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josh b
Contributor I
December 27, 2021

Sonos Roam - Issues with Alexa & Audible

I have been having issues with playing Audible on my Sonos Roam via Alexa. I use the command “Alexa, play Audible” but after 3-4 minutes the audiobook will stop. On the Sonos app I get the following message: “Unable to play <Audiobook Chapter> - the song is not encoded properly.” Sometimes Audible will skip ahead 2 chapters after the message, but mostly the audiobook stops completely.

This issue only happens if I play Audible via an Alexa command. There are no issues as far as I can tell with other services (eg Spotify, iHeartRadio, etc) or playing Audible through my phone.

Below are the following solutions I’ve tried and their respective diagnostic confirmation numbers after the issue reoccurred:

Completely reset the speaker - 1687113073 and 1909624914

Switched speaker to a 2.4 Wi-Fi network - 1319891684

Reset my Wi-Fi router - 267135584

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    15 replies

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    WFNB1
    Lyricist II
    February 10, 2022

    Dated 1/28/22

    "The diagnostic was helpful in pinpointing what's happening behind-the-scenes, and I wanted to let you know that our team is looking into this. We don't have a timeline to provide just yet, but for now, you should be able to start Audible playback from the Sonos app, as well as use Alexa for playback commands, such as pausing or increasing the volume. Thank you again for reporting this to us, our developers are on the case and will have this resolved as soon as possible."

    Audio_book_lover_123
    Lyricist I
    March 31, 2022

    Very disappointing from Sonos. 

    It appears that this issue first appeared almost one year ago. See this thread for details - 

    Sadly, this also mirrors the great Sonos Audible outage of 2016-2018. See this thread for details - 

     Based on my research, I have to say I’m afraid of two things:

    (1) Sonos is not really a software company and is routinely slow to fix this type of issue. 

    (2) Sonos appears to have repeated issues with Audible/Amazon that take years to fix. 

    Wish I had better news. 

    Waxbare
    Lyricist II
    June 15, 2022

    Did anyone find a solution to this? 

    GeraldColdfire
    Lyricist I
    August 19, 2022

    Wanted to bump this thread again. We replaced an Amazon echo with a Sonos one in our kitchen, and one of the main things we do is listen to audible. Incredibly frustrating if it has taken a year and this still doesn’t work. We never had any issues with the echo in the exact same location.

    Steelstar
    Avid Contributor II
    September 22, 2022

    I am rather sure SONOS perfectly knows about the problem but they are doing nothing to solve it for some reason. It's almost 2 years I guess this is like this. In the past I have contacted Sonos, Audible, Amazon and nothing happens. In Italy Audible is not even a Sonos service (it's available everywhere but not in Italy) so I can't use the Sonos app. We ended up, hoping this gets fixed before or later (but I lost hope at the moment), using a Roam via bluetooth, so we can use that directly or as a bridge to other speakers in our Sonos system.

    But this is very very disappointing considering how much Audible is spread and used.

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