Sonos Playlist Size Limits

It’s perhaps also helpful to mention here that the 65,000 track/slot limit, is nothing to do with the storage of the music files, it’s the amount of pointers/shortcuts to the music tracks - but some track-pointers with very long paths and metadata can sometimes reduce that 65,000 limit, as some may use more than one available ‘slot’ for the actual pointer.

The limit applies to a Sonos room queue aswell as the number of tracks that can be saved/indexed from the local music library (Thats about 135 days of music playback, if each of the tracks are just 3 minutes long and the library tracks played for 24 hours every single day).

There will be some temperature cycling as the AMP’s go from Standby to Operate. You cannot eliminate all cycles. There is some temperature change related to the amplifier output while playing music. While it might save some power, a punishing style of use would be to power down a piece of equipment every time you leave the room. This would maximize the number and depth of the cycles. I tend to power up a unit at first use and power down at the end of the day. Power up is also very stressful event because there is a inrush of current for certain parts. It’s sort of a race to see which events will ultimately kill the unit. It’s time consuming, but a designer could prepare a document predicting failure rates related to temperature and power cycles. This is the routine for large production runs where the manufacturer wants to control warranty costs.

I’m conservative with respect to temperature 99° is not the end of the world, but I don’t like it. Depending on where you live and the season, 99° might be the best that you can expect. I’ve seen situations where there is no chance of generating airflow into and out of a closet, but a small fan made a big difference in equipment temperature because the fan circulated air over cooler walls.

Power quality varies by building and neighborhood. Some areas I would classify as “lightning alley” and industrial duty surge suppression is warranted on all important electronics. It’s possible to install surge suppression at the home’s power entrance. Vey old multistory buildings are a risk. New or recently updated buildings are relatively safe. I’m in an urban area with duplex homes and power is relatively stable. My computer is on a UPS and I have an industrial duty suppressor for peripherals. A few times a year there will be a momentary outage and the UPS saves a lot of grief. Other than the incidental protection afforded by cheap power strips, I’m not protecting my SONOS. At one point I was living in an unstable suburban area and we had a generator. Before the generator there was a major hurricane, water was rising in the basement and the power was out. Electric pumps don’t work well without power. I was able to bail enough water to manage the situation.

Testing surge suppressors requires specialized equipment. Typically, surge suppressors fail “open”, meaning that they have lost all effectiveness. A suppressor can deal with a certain number of “events”, fewer high energy events than lower energy events. And, the quality of suppression can gradually erode after a number of events. I see some very silly surge suppressors that have a fuse for the suppressor element. Essentially the equipment is protecting the surge “protection” element because a large event will blow the fuse, disconnecting the element, and the next event will damage the equipment.

By the way “ambient” is just that, the actual box surface will likely be a higher temperature, inside components higher yet. The actual components might be rated at 80°C and as long as the ambient is below the recommendation, the internal components will be within their safe operating range. 

What did Sonos support say?

There are several issues that could potentially be an issue, it’s hard to tell from anecdotal evidence, there would be much more in the actual log files that Sonos has access to when you submit a diagnostic.

The process occurs on Sonos hardware, and not on your controller on the PC, so any network disruption might be an issue. This could be simple wifi interference , or duplicate IP address issues while the Sonos system is scanning the data wherever you have it loaded. 

Additionally, in some cases Sonos is intolerant of specific non standard characters in the song data, and will stop the process if it runs in to one of those characters. They continue to ‘fix’ this issue, but it seems to pop up somewhat frequently. I think the most recent issue is on the Beam Gen 2 while precessing the data, but I wouldn’t swear to that, either as the actual problem still existing, or whether it’s still an issue on one or more than one device. Again, Sonos support would likely be able to read the data in the diagnostics and give better feedback. 

I have zero insight into what Sonos has on their roadmap for ‘fixing’ or ‘upgrading’. They don’t release that sort of data to the unwashed masses until it goes live, and even then, they do an extremely poor job of telling us what has been fixed in their ‘release notes’, most often we get the incredibly lazy ‘bug fixes’ without any derails. 

Are you using playlists, or Favorites? If I recall, there’s a limit to number of Favorites, but not to actual playlists, although that could be a false memory, and am happy to be corrected by someone with more knowledge. On my screen, there’s an ‘edit’ button on the top right where I can delete those made in error. 

Hardwired doesn’t preclude a duplicate IP address, or other networking issues, but Sonos would, I hope, be able to see something in the data. 

The “edit” button isn’t on the save screen, it’s on the “select” screen. 

What device are you using as a controller?

Airgetiam: I am hardware wired to all of the amps, speakers, etc. according to my System Info. (W=0)  
I have had my system analyzed by my local support company a few times and they found no network issues.  
(We are working on a new dropout issue with my system.  The playlist problem has been around since
installation.)

Ken: What is a "Time-out limit of 15 seconds?" How do I measure or assess this?

So if I look under "Music Library" on my (desktop) app and it lists "Imported playlists," are you
saying that the total of all of these playlists can't exceed 10,000?  I'm not sure what comprises
"Sonos stored playlists."  Anyway, all of my playlists in that list might get close to 10,000, but
it wouldn't exceed it by much.  Is this what you mean?  How do I determine what are in my "Sonos
stored playlists"? 

I only load playlist at a time, so I'm assuming that's the only Sonos stored one.  The others are just names in a list that can be selected and loaded, right?

It's hard to believe that the "shortcuts" on my system could reduce the limit this far.

Buzz:
I've actually had a song that contained  an invalid character and Sonos noted it and skipped past it.  I fixed all of them.  My songs all have the basic metadata common to mp3's.

I know how to submit a diagnostic to Sonos.  How do I follow up with them?

How do I determine my player RAM, and what is that exactly?  Is the RAM in the amps or speakers
or elsewhere?  You’d think that would be listed in the info about my system…..

Thanks guys.

It’s partly a side-issue to the playlist limitations being discussed. The ‘queue’ on a Sonos device (aswell as the local library) can hold up-to 65,000 tracks, but when loading that queue, there is also a 15 second timeout limit in place - so after 15 seconds the attempt to load tracks to a speaker will timeout, but if you look back at my earlier screenshot, I loaded my entire local library 25,746 tracks to a Sonos Move and that took no more than 4 seconds across a gigabit wired connection from the NAS box, with the Move connected to the faster 5Ghz WiFi band… some SonosNet connections are often slower operating on the 2.4Ghz band. I just mentioned it ‘briefly’ earlier, in case your issue was related to a time-out, rather than the playlist limitation of 10,000, tracks which is a limit for all the playlists/tracks you have saved to your ‘My Sonos’ tab in the App - I too have reached that limit (long ago) …and if I try to add more tracks, I usually receive a message ‘similar’ to the following from the App:

Well, that’s my point.  The queue list I stored went to the Sonos Playlists “location”, not the favorites.  And my limit seems to be four playlists.  I got the “out of space” error message when I tried to add a fifth to the Sonos Playlists via the queue screen I sent you, above.  I'm guessing this is not normal; there’s an issue with the system, right?

Yes, the younger tend to love their phones and do everything on them.  I have 32” PC monitor which is far easier to work from, especially for creating my playlists, etc.  I have the iOS client (iPhone 11) which I use to control my system and my TV, but creation here is a lot harder, at least for me.  It is surprising that the desktop and mobile don’t better mirror each other, but oh well.

Thanks again.