Skip to main content

Currently I have 110,365 songs available in my library.

 

The way I got around the limit is to mirror the entire folder structure of my music library ,

but in this case each album subfolder contains a playlist “.m3u” file that  references

the absolute path and filename of the original songs. Normally this would be an exhaustive task

that no sane person would attempt. Luckily, computers can do this kind of work for us.


I used a program called MP3Tag.

Go to File/Options/Playlist, and check the box  "Entries relative from work directory".

This is essential; it allows Sonos to find the files no matter where your mirror lies.

 

MP3Tag can generate playlists, and the file name of the playlist can be a formatted string and is defined in the "Filename of Playlist" box. I used for example

D:\TEMP\M3U\%artist%\%album%.m3u

When finished, the folder D:\TEMP\M3U will have a folder for each artist and these will have a subfolder for each album, with a SINGLE file, the albumname.m3u file which Sonos will index and will treat as one file.

Your files must be tagged properly for this to work correctly.

In MP3Tag , go to File/Add Directory and browse to your music library. Be sure to check the Subdirectories box.  Let it index your music, it will take some time. When it’s finished,

go to File/Playlist (all files) Ctrl+P -  This Creates a playlist of all files listed in the File List into a single playlist, BUT, there’s a secret function. If you press Shift when running this command, Mp3tag creates a playlist for every different directory.

It will work quickly and then your M3U folder will be ready.  I then moved The whole M3U folder to my NAS and indexed it with the Sonos music library.  Make sure your NAS permissions are set to let Sonos read the folder.

To listen, browse to Music Library/Folders/M3U and you will be presented with a list of every artist and their respective albums that is natural and easy to navigate, and as I said, I have nearly twice the 65K limit available for listening.

 

From my understanding, the 65K number is a ‘fuzzy’ number, and has much more to do with total memory used by the library, which includes items such as tags. This is why, frequently, those with classical items in their library tend to get impacted more often, frequently the ‘size’ of the data file for describing that piece of music is larger than many ‘pop’ style songs.

Many users have chosen to go with the Plex solution that has been offered, if they’re unwilling to make the changes as you’ve described. Either should work, in the end, but to my knowledge, we don’t have a hard data point on how much ‘memory’ is allowed to be used, just that vague 65k number. 

65,000 index entries is a hard upper limit. If the metadata is verbose and there are a lot of large playlists, the players might run out of memory before reaching the 65,000 limit. I also suspect that there is a time limit and large, complex metadata might cause the indexer to run so slowly that the timeout is triggered. 

“65,000” for 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 = 65536 !?…

Otherwise, thank you IOnceSawAYeti your your tip: it's brilliant. I note it...  ;-)

 

65,000 is a decimal number.

Terms & ConditionsCookie settings