Sonos keeps stopping and skipping songs

OK, if you're playing from the Spotify app, you need not worry about the autolock thing, that has to do with music "on this iPhone".

Now, I understand you're not technical....and since I have no idea what router you have, I can't give you any instructions on how to set up reserved IP addresses. If you want, feel free to look at a manual for your router, and figure out if you want to do it.

But what I can do is give you a quick and dirty way of doing effectively the same thing. And all you need to know how to do is unplug things, and plug them back in.

Start by unplugging from power all of your Sonos device, including any BRIDGE or BOOST that you might have. If you don't have one of those, no worries...just wanted to be sure that you unplugged anything that has a Sonos label on it. 🙂

While those devices are unplugged, power down your phone. Don't put it to sleep, make sure it's really turned off, i.e. no power to it at all.

Now, unplug your router, and wait a minute. After that minute, go ahead and plug the router back in. It's OK if you have a modem/router, you just need to reboot the device that is acting to hand out the IP addresses to everything that connects to it.

Wait a minute for your router to finish booting up, there's likely to be a lot of blinking lights, but it shouldn't take more than a couple of minutes, max. Once it's back up, go ahead and turn the power back on your phone. Wait for the phone to come back up, and connect to your wifi.

Once that's done, plug in your first Sonos device. Again, if you have a BRIDGE or BOOST, or a Sonos device that's connected to the router with an ethernet cable, plug that one in first. If you've only got the one PLAY:1, that's fine, go ahead an plug it in.

Again, wait a minute for the device to boot up. If you've got more Sonos devices, go ahead and power them up as well, waiting a minute or two between each one. What you're doing is allowing each device to go through the boot process, and then as part of that process, they'll ask your refreshed router for a new IP address, and because you rebooted the router, each one will get a new and fresh IP address, and not the potential duplicate.

That's a lot of typing for a fairly simple process. :)

The other thing you may want to look at is what wifi channel you're using. When you set up your router, you would have had to choose one. If you can look at the settings on your router, check to see which one it is on. If there's a setting that says the channel is "Auto", that means that it can change what channel it is using at will, which can cause Sonos to have to search for a new channel every time the router changes it. What you want to do is set your router to use one of three channels: 1, 6, or 11. Which one is best depends much more on what your neighbors are using than most anything else. If you were to post a diagnostic, the guys at Sonos could take a look at make a recommendation, but see what one you're on right now, and try one of the others, and see if that helps.

Hope this was fairly easy to follow. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask.