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Sonos Voice Control + Apple Music - "This Item is no longer available"

  • 14 August 2023
  • 1 reply
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S

Hi All,

 

I switched to Sonos Voice Control (SVC) several months ago and loved the fact that it was more accurate than Alexa because it had a narrower list of things to do.  However, more recently, I’ve started to notice that there is an error with the way that it works with Apple Music. I have never used SVC with any other music service.  What seems to be happening is this:

 

  1. I say “Hey Sonos - play Out of Touch by Hall and Oats” 
  2. SVC correctly interprets my request and finds the correct song from somewhere (i’ll come back to this point). 
  3. The song is not played.  To the user it seems like the voice command didn’t work.
  4. I check the app and it shows the correct song, but it is not playing.  
  5. I click “Play” and I get the message “This item is no longer available.” 
  6. If I search for Out of Touch by Hall and Oats manually on the app, the album version which Sonos found earlier is not displayed, and I am instead shown a different version.  For example, whereas SVC found and tried to play “The Very best of Daryl Hall & John Oates” album, searching manually returns several albums containing the desired song, but it doesn’t return the album which SVC found.  I can play “Out of Touch” from various singles, compilations, and other Hall & Oates albums.  

Therefore, what seems to be happening is that SVC is either finding songs on another service which I don’t subscribe to (only Apple Music is on my system) or it is finding songs based on an out of date cache of the Apple Music library.  While I have used the example of Out of Touch, this happens with alarming regularity and in fact I have basically stopped using the SVC feature for several weeks (maybe months?) because it just seemed to be very unreliable.  

I am an S2 user.  The same issue happens when using S2 App on iPhone or on Mac. 

Steps already taken:  Updated every speaker in the system / Reboot router / Reboot products / Reauthorised Apple Music / Removed and re-added Sonos Voice Control from whole system.   I am an S2 user.  

Has anyone else experienced this, and can anyone suggest further troubleshooting steps?  I am tech literate and usually work these things out on my own, but I amloathe to spend several hours poking around in the dark when I am several thousands of pounds invested into this system. 

Thanks in advance, and let’s help finding the answer can help other frustrated customers like me.  

 

I wanted to add that some songs will play fine using SVC (Cloudbusting by Kate Bush, for example) but the majority of my requests fail.  For example: Sacrifice by Elton John, Cry Baby by Ce Lo Green, Don’t Give Up by Chicane all show the behaviour mentioned at 1-6 in the post above. 

Cheers


Stuart

 

Moderator edit: combined posts

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Best answer by Corry P 22 August 2023, 11:35

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1 reply

Corry P
Userlevel 7
Badge +18

Hi @StuartBee 

Welcome to the Sonos Community!

First of all, thanks for reporting - if there was an issue with how this was working, we’d certainly want to know. The list of music available that SVC searches is in fact updated on a daily basis.

In this case, however, I think we can put it down to the difference between what Apple Music’s catalogue is like in the UK, and what it is like in the US.

Although Sonos Voice Control is available everywhere, it is only currently supported for US English and French. Part of this regional support is that the voice recognition is trained on local accents, another part of it is that it is trained on the names of local artists and listening trends (popular songs and radio stations). Finally, when you use SVC, the search it performs when you ask for something specific is relayed through our servers to the US Apple Music servers. I believe there is probably a difference in the content available in the UK and in the US, and it is this difference that is causing you trouble with these particular artists. International music licensing is a complicated business, and it would not surprise me in the slightest to hear that certain albums simply aren’t allowed to be provided in certain parts of the world.

All this amounts to the fact that until SVC is officially supported in the UK, this kind of behaviour can be expected, in comparatively rare cases.

I hope this helps.

 

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." - Albert Einstein
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