I’d read through the wifi interference FAQ. There’s likely something in there that would help. If not, I would recommend that you submit a system diagnostic within 10 minutes of experiencing this problem, and call Sonos Support to discuss it.

When you talk to the phone folks, there are more options available. They are available Monday through Friday during business hours.

There may be information included in the diagnostic that will help Sonos pinpoint the issue and help you find a solution.  

Hello,

I haven’t forgotten about this post, and I came down with an answer.

I went the synology route with airsonicadvanced, and via this software I can stream my music without the need of transcoding it. I had some sweaty moments integrating it to Sonos but it works a thousand times better than the built in library of sonos.

For the ones stumbling upon this ticket in the future : avoid the built in library of sonos, it’s extremely poorly handling flac data, and there’s no way to adapt the buffer to it, and the wireless power is absolutely irrelevant to this issue.

airsonic-advanced is not perfect, but its 1000 times better than almost any other solution I’ve seen for local library.

I have a small music library - 6500 songs, and I can’t use SMB to play every song.

I am looking for airsonic to do a few things:

1. provide a cloud queue service.
2. activate the ratings interface.
3. provide a better installation experience so that non-technical users can get it running.

I have a WD MyCloud 3tb and never had a problem with Sonos streaming FLAC files (all my CD's are FLAC format).

Ditto, except using a Synology Diskstation NAS.   This is across a seven-zone system.  Of course, I am using SonosNet……..

I stream CD quality FLAC to multiple Sonos over Ethernet and SonosNet using a Raspberry Pi 3B with no issues. CPU load is minimal even with multiple streams of different music.

I’m betting on it being a wireless interference issue. The Diagnostic is the best route, looking at your Network Matrix can also be informative, dig here for explanations on what all the matrix stuff means.

How does this limitation manifest itself? I’m worried now because I’m just setting up my system, based on SMB (Samba), and I expect to have more than 6500 tracks in the library.

How can that be, when SMB is simply a generic file sharing interface? Does it have a maximum number of files or directories that it can index or serve up?

SMB is merely the method of the speakers reading the files on the NAS, and would have zero implications as to how many files can be ‘read’. There are other limitations that can rear their head, but SMB would not be part of that.

The more prevalent issue seems to be the amount of storage / memory on the speakers to deal with larger playlists. And you’d likely need to be closer to 10k songs in a playlist, although that number is somewhat fungible, as it includes title and other ‘tags’ of the songs. 

You can always load up your library, submit a diagnostic, put the number here and ask Sonos to tell you how close you are to each of the storage limit criteria.