Skip to main content

My morning alarm has become increasing unreliable. I have a Sonos One in my bedroom. Recently, I was getting chimes more often than the music I had set up. I tried all the basics before resorting to a total rebuild. I have 14 Sonos speakers - the oldest are a pair of play:3 from 2013. I unplugged everyone. I unplugged my router and range extenders. I factory reset every speaker. Factory reset the router and range extenders. Set up the router and range extenders making sure latest firmware and keeping most default settings. Once I was happy wifi was working, I created a new Sonos account and added every speaker. All good. That was a week ago. Since then my daily wake up alarm has worked once.

I have Spotify family plan and we have an unused account which is only used by Sonos for alarms. When I play directly from Spotify App the music plays. When I pick the Spotify service in the Sonos App, it plays. When I create an alarm one minute in the future and test, it works.

Sonos One 
Hardware Version : 1.21.1.8-2.2
Software Version : 85.0-64200
Sonos iOS App Version : 80.21.6
Spotify iOS App Version : 9.0.48.415
Router TP-Link Archer AXE75 + RE550 / AC1900 Wi-Fi Range Extender
Networks : 2.4GHz + 5GHz

Happy to provide any additional information to resolve this issue.

Likely there is some sort of delay and the alarm is impatient while connecting to SPOTIFY. Probably you’ll need to submit a diagnostic immediately after one of these failures and work with SONOS support.

Things to try: change your alarm time a minute or so. Maybe SPOTIFY is overwhelmed with other alarms at that time.

If you are Grouping Rooms decrease the size of the Group.

If you are Grouping Rooms, experiment with changing the Group “Coordinator” (the Room used to build the Group). I would avoid using PLAY:3 as the Coordinator because it is slower than the newer units.

If any of the units is wired to the network, use one of these as the Group Coordinator.

While I have no proof, I wonder if a very large SPOTIFY playlist sometimes takes too long to load.

Thanks buzz - I’ll try your suggestion of moving the alarm by a couple of minutes.

Thanks for the additional advice.

I don’t currently use wired network. I could rig up a temp solution to see if that fixes it. 

An interesting little trick that was effective years ago was to use two alarms. The first alarm would play a silent track. It was no big deal if this track failed and played nothing. This was followed by a second alarm that requested the desired playlist. The goal was to wake-up everything in the path to the music before requesting the actual music.

This may not be very effective in your case if the first, silent alarm triggers the chime.

3 out of 3 so far - changed from 06:00 to 05:58

Interesting option with a silent alarm. 

The total rebuild also fixed a problem where one of a pair of ERA 100’s would stop working, an issue I’d previously failed to resolve. So not a total waste of time. However, knowing about the timeshift could have saved a load of early morning grief sooner. 

Thanks again for your help.

Reply


Terms & ConditionsCookie settings