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In my music library (on a Synology network server) I have many folder and file names with special foreign language characters. When Sonos scans my music library it reads and displays all the characters just fine on any Sonos controller.



However, when I create and export playlists for this library (via MediaMonkey), the playlist files look fine in Windows Notepad but Sonos can't display them correctly, and the playlists don't work, since (I assume) the playlist entries don't match with what Sonos knows the file names to be.



I have tried exporting the playlists in various encodings (ANSI, UTF-8, and Unicode) and while they all look fine in Notepad, none of them work. I should make it clear that for playlists referring to music files WITHOUT any special characters, Sonos work with both my ANSI and UTF-8 just fine - these work the way they are supposed to. But Sonos chokes on special characters in imported playlists no matter how I encode them.



Is there a way around this besides eliminating all the special characters from my folder and file names?
Can you play the offending files directly (ie not via a playlist)? I'm guessing the Synology samba code might be confused by non ascii file paths.
I never found a way around the problem and ended up editing every problem music file. Different NAS though, a WD Live Drive so it likely isn't just yours acting strange.
Responding to controlav: The music files themselves can be played perfectly well in Sonos when accessed not via a playlist. All the foreign characters appear perfectly well. AND all the playlists that don't have foreign characters in them display and work just fine. It seems to be a bug in the way Sonos reads imported playlists with foreign characters - and I've tried saving the playlists in ANSI, UTF-8, and Unicode. They all display wrong in Sonos, although they are wrong in different ways, and none of them will play the relevant files.
Use UTF8 and post a screenshot of a sample of what it should be and what it is.
I have the same problem, though not on a Synology server (just reading files from my Windows desktop). I'm exporting playlists from MusicBee. The songs play fine if I'm playing the album that they're on -- if I try to play them from an imported playlist, I get a "file not found" error.
Hi,

I have the same problem. Have you encountered the solution?

Maybe Sonos have earn sufficient money now to fix this type of issue ?

Thank you
Exact same problem here - Sonos skips any song that has special chars in an imported playlist and only plays the other songs. It does play the problematic songs without a problem when selected directly and not via a playlist. Is there a way to open a bug or alert Sonos support to this issue to get a formal response?



Many thanks!
I have this problem, too. It would be nice too know if Sonos plans to fix this, otherwise playlists aren't very useful for me.
I wouldn't expect it to be very high on their priority list of things to work on, unfortunately. I have that same issue, but have learned to live with it.

Here is a workaround.  I’m having the same issue with a Qnap, Sonos Controller for PC Ver 10.5

 

If you add the imported playlist to a Sonos playlist or  favorite it works perfectly.  

 

Go to Music Library/Imported Playlists  Click Down Triangle  click add to Sonos Favorite or Playlist. 

 

Yeah, one extra step, but simple fix.  Now, why is the native music manager in the controller so weak?

 

Hi,

I found something that works for me.

First create m3u file
Example
E:\Muziek\Blues\Carmen Maki\Poems In The Midnight\01 - 時には母のない子のように.flac

Substitute like destination in Sonos
So, ‘E:\Muziek’ is replaced with ‘\\192.168.5.200\Music’
Example
\\192.168.5.200\Music\Blues\Carmen Maki\Poems In The Midnight\01 - 時には母のない子のように.flac

In excel, use the encodeurl function 
Output is : 
%5C%5C192.168.5.200%5CMusic%5CBlues%5CCarmen%20Maki%5CPoems%20In%20The%20Midnight%5C01%20-%20%E6%99%82%E3%81%AB%E3%81%AF%E6%AF%8D%E3%81%AE%E3%81%AA%E3%81%84%E5%AD%90%E3%81%AE%E3%82%88%E3%81%86%E3%81%AB.flac

Then substitute ‘%5C%5C’ for ‘//’ and substitute ‘%5C’ for ‘/’
Output is : //192.168.5.200/Music/Blues/Carmen%20Maki/Poems%20In%20The%20Midnight/01%20-%20%E6%99%82%E3%81%AB%E3%81%AF%E6%AF%8D%E3%81%AE%E3%81%AA%E3%81%84%E5%AD%90%E3%81%AE%E3%82%88%E3%81%86%E3%81%AB.flac

Then add in front of it ‘x-file-cifs:’
Output is : x-file-cifs://192.168.5.200/Music/Blues/Carmen%20Maki/Poems%20In%20The%20Midnight/01%20-%20%E6%99%82%E3%81%AB%E3%81%AF%E6%AF%8D%E3%81%AE%E3%81%AA%E3%81%84%E5%AD%90%E3%81%AE%E3%82%88%E3%81%86%E3%81%AB.flac

Save as *.m3u file and copy somewhere, so SONOS can import it.
 

Goofball, you are a bloody star! Many many thanks for this fix as I have been struggling with this for a couple of years now.  And now it’s all fixed and I don’ have to rename all my Michael Bublé tracks to remove the accented ‘e’. (And now you know my guilty secret!).  Amazing, thanks again.

 

Martin

I have all my CD’s digitized on a hard disk connected to my home network. My Sonos Cube can reach all music files on there to send them to my audio system. I don’t use playlists, but rather manually select the CD (map) that I want to listen to. But like mentioned over and over again over the past too many years here , all files with special characters will not play. It’s a real pitty that Sonos, after so many years, still didn’t solved that annoying issue.

What a local , US-only attitude 😞 ...a real pitty.

Keep in mind that Sonos has been locked into an ancient Linux kernel and apps for many years now with no ability to update much. With the introduction of Legacy status for the most limited Sonos devices there will be a path to moving to a new Linux kernel and applications. I expect that to happen at some point and when it does a lot of the problems we see will just go away with the many year newer base system.

Network paths with special characters are a particular challenge, as it requires that the client (Sonos speaker) and the file server (NAS) agree on the codepage.

Generally Sonos uses utf8 encoding (as UPnP requires it to) but I have no idea what SMBv1 uses for paths. Pretty sure SMBv1 pre-dates utf8, it was created in the wild west days of multiple MBCS code pages (shudder).

Sonos’ interest in NAS support is pretty low these days (as Windows and Macs don’t need SMB at all any more) so I’d put the chances of improvements in this area as “unlikely”.

I’m also having the same issue. I’m going to try what robismijnnaam mentioned as saving as Sonos playlists isn’t sustainable. It caps at a (relatively) small number of max songs across all Sonos playlists which basically renders them useless except for temporary use.

On the off chance, has anyone gone through the trouble of writing a script to sanitize playlists to be Sonos friendly? Considering this...

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