Sonos Roam - Issues with Alexa & Audible

  • 27 December 2021
  • 15 replies
  • 601 views

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


15 replies

I have similarly had this issue with Sonos One, Sono Play:5 and Sonos Theater Arc. It is extremely frustrating and causes me to use my Sonos less, since I end up just playing the audible book from my phone instead. I really hope Sonos figures out what’s going on here. 

I'm having the same problem with Audible on my Beam with Alexa. Waiting on SONOS to fix it.

This also means nobody test this part of functions otherwise this never happens,  It's not ok regarding the price and the marketing done around voice commands based on Alexa on SONOS product. This is working on all Amazon Echo !

Same issue here with my new Sonos One. Mine also doesn’t progress - after the 3-4 minutes are played, when I try to resume listening, it’s back at the same place it was originally. 

I’m having the same problem with the ARC and the BEAM. When started from ALEXA, the Audible book is randomly stopping. I’ve to ask Alexa to continue. Sometimes, the chapter is cutted off and I’m missing the end of the chapter.

I’m having the same issues:

  • story stoops after 4-5 minutes
  • story gets cut off at the end of a chapter
  • i can’t fast forward or rewind with Alexa

these problems don’t exist when I play from audible. They’re only a problem when starting audible from Alexa.

 

can someone from Sonos please respond?

This is a community site. If you need to speak with someone from Sonos directly, you can call Sonos Support directly to discuss it. There are very few forum moderators who can respond, many more phone folks who have that job. 

I am having the same issue.  I bought my Roam, my first Sonos speaker, specifically to listen to Audible via Alexa.  This makes it a $150 paperweight.

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Anyone get any feed back from Sonos on this, as I am having the same issue.

I sent them a screenshot and system log yesterday.  I’m awaiting a response.

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Hi, did they respond?

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."

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. 

Did anyone find a solution to this? 

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.

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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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