Sonos Playlist Size Limits

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. 

People will return units for various reasons, not necessarily because of device failure, and these units can no longer be sold as “new”.

Since SONOS volunteered to exchange your units, I suspect that there was a known issue with a batch of serial numbers.

With respect to your equipment environment, there are a bunch of “failure clocks” running inside any piece of equipment, eventually a clock times out and the unit will fail. Some clocks run faster at elevated temperatures, some are simply the number of hours since assembly, It’s not fair, but some clocks run faster if a unit is not used. One of the most significant clocks is related to the depth and number of temperature cycles. When you power up a unit it starts at ambient and runs up to its operating temperature, then cools back to ambient when powered down. This is one cycle. Deeper cycles are more stressful. After a finite number of cycles at a depth of xx degrees, the unit will fall. Turning a unit ON and leaving it ON for weeks or months is only one cycle.

For any model there will be some “infant mortalities” that will crop up in the first few weeks, then the failure rate will plummet to near zero for a number of years then start creeping up with a different set of failures. Each unit has its own signature. Large repair depots can often tell you what is wrong if you give them only the model number because any units that fail, typically fail the same way. This doesn’t mean that they will all fail, only that those that do fail, do so in a characteristic way. It’s possible that your AMP falls in a known bin. We will never know how large this bin might be.

For me, 99°F is a little high for the ambient temperature. Perhaps you could install a small fan somewhere to circulate the air. Ideally, you should allow air to circulate through the cabinet. A small flow can make a large difference in ambient.

I also prefer the desktop controller. You should check Help → Error Log… . Sometimes there is something useful here.

No, that’s not really where playlists should exist. I expect there’s some confusion in the difference between favorites, and playlists.  There’s a limited amount of space in the controller for favorites, but much more for playlists. 

I don’t have a PC client handy, but on the iOS client which I do, playlists exist under the “star” icon, not the “musical note” icon. That page has Recently Played, and Playlists, of which I think there can be many. The last thing on that page is stations that you can add. And of course, the “edit” function is on that page, so that you can modify or delete previous entries.

As a note, the desktop clients aren’t really all the best for doing a lot of this stuff, they’ve been relegated to fairly static use, where all the development is on the mobile (Android/iOS) clients. You can’t even do basic system maintenance like adding a player, etc, on the desktop clients, you must use a mobile client. 

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?

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. 

Well, they would have access to diagnostics, whereas the rest of us have to work off of assumptions and mental models. They likely would see any error messages, if there are any being generated. 

In my mind, it’s also a “how good is the person I’m talking to in understanding the issue”, as I suspect there are variations in the CS reps understanding of what they are looking at. Sure, there are those who probably don’t have the same deeper understanding of what’s going on as others. But I’d hope they have the ability to hand your call off to someone who has a better understanding, rather than sticking to the scripted response that I’d assume they have. This is not a slam against the CSRs, by the way, I think they do a great job, but there’s always a constant churn, and a need for deeper understanding. You’re not very likely to end up talking to a programmer/expert in any case. At least I hope not. I certainly had a policy that my engineers did not read the forums I ran for my customers….they’d be distracted from what was important to deal with a “one-off” situation, which wasn’t beneficial for the greater good. 

Thanks.  I’ve never seen that message.  All of the playlist just doesn’t load; in fact, you can see part of the last song to load at the very end.  It just terminates.

RAM (Random Access Memory) is hard wired into each SONOS player. Users have no direct access to this and it is a finite resource. Early in the life of SONOS (2005) RAM was much more expensive. A copy of the library index and SONOS playlists is stored in each player. Storing a copy of the library index and playlists in each player is one reason why the SONOS system is so responsive and resilient. Yes, it would be possible to distribute sections of the index and playlists among the players, but what happens if one or more of the players is offline for some reason? A portion of the index would be missing. Another option would be to use a separate ‘box’ or computer storing these items to always be online. With the current scheme all of the SONOS controllers can be shut down after music play is started. If a computer was required during playback, music would stop while the computer is OFF, rebooting, or updating. While it would be possible to redesign the library index and expand the space available for storing playlists, this would not be possible for older players with less RAM.

The simple fact is the room ‘queue’ will hold upto 65k (65,000) tracks and that’s where you load your playlists to for playback, but also remember it’s subject to a time-out limit of 15secs.. the 10,000 playlist limit is the Sonos playlist limit and that’s for ALL Sonos stored playlists - so it’s not an individual Sonos playlist limit. I hope that helps to clarify things.

65K?  That’s not even a megabyte.  And 65k is the # of tracks as it states here.  No reference to the size of an entire library, which for most of us run into the gigabytes, many gigs...

“• Total number of tracks (65,000) - Number of indexed tracks = Maximum number of M3Us
imported”

The help site is specifically about playlists, imported playlists in particular.

I’m confused….

I just found this link that notes that the number of imported M3U tracks is 65,000 - # of indexed tracks = Max # of M3U’s imported.

What’s an “indexed track”?  My playlists are M3U and my limit is less than 2,900.