Sonos Playlist Size Limits

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. 

I can tell you for a fact that i can’t load any more than 3,000 songs.  Sonos just terminates anything beyond that.  That’s no where close to 65,000.  My play lists are imported.

What do you suppose is going on?

The tracks are stored locally on an SSD.  The PC is hard wired into Sonos as well as I understand it….

Possible duplicate IP address issue, knocking the Sonos off the network momentarily? Have you assigned reserved IP addresses in your router’s DHCP table?

The PC should not be hard wired to Sonos, it should be hard wired to your router, the same as then Sonos should. And the SSD. All three devices work off of the network created by the router, none of them should be directly connected to Sonos. 

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. 

The largest playlist I appear to have here is 3652 tracks and when I just tried that, it loads okay.

The whole of my local library is 25,746 tracks - I am able to load the entire library too, but it won’t allow me to save it as a playlist (as expected) as I believe the track limit (for all Sonos playlists) is 10,000 songs, as mentioned earlier .. but obviously I can load all those library tracks to a queue (see screenshot).

The queue limit is around 65,000 tracks (give or take), but as stated earlier the loading of the queue is also limited by a 15s time-out. 

So that’s my experience with my system here running on a SonosNet connection. 

WiFi these days (and wired networks) are pretty quick, much quicker than a SonosNet connection in most cases, so perhaps if your WiFi supports your current system okay, then maybe try running your entire setup on the local WiFi instead and see if that improves things and allows your large playlists to work. 

If not, you can always revert back to the SonosNet connection.

Assuming that you have entered the WiFi details into the SONOS system, you can easily flip between SonosNet and WiFi by simply eliminating any wired SONOS connections. While the changeover may require a minute or two, the system will manage all of the details. Note that ROAM and MOVE are always WiFi.

I wanted to follow up on what has ultimately transpired.  I also have a couple of related questions.

I contacted Sonos’ support as you all suggested.  After a bit of a winding road that took a couple of hours to no resolution, I ended up with escalated support.  In less than 30 minutes, the technician announced that all three of my amps had failed.  I don’t have the model numbers, but I bought them in mid-2018.

The memory on each was going bad and by his estimate only about 1/3 of it was still “available”.  He also told me that the amps themselves would eventually completely give out.  I needed to replace them.  To their great credit, they comped me three new amps.  (They ended up being refurbished ones.)  I had them installed a couple of days ago and the playlist problem disappeared.  I can load my 3,200-song list in under 3 seconds. 

I had also been experiencing episodes where my music would simply stop playing (no sound) for 10 – 20 seconds, an issue that my local support provider was investigating.  We’ll see if this recurs.  So far, so good. 

The amps (UPC code 0878269007166 and the SKU # AmpG1US2Blk) seem much faster and have twice the power of the old ones.  I'm not sure if the faster is a result of improvements to the amp or just that they’re working properly.  (Thoughts here anyone?)  

As I said, it was outstanding for Sonos to warranty me three new amps but the tech offered no explanation as to why they had all failed.  My local support guy I mentioned above who did the installation and addresses the various issues that crop up for time to time said that he could count on one hand the number of bad amps he’d ever seen, and most of them were related to power hits.

I have a watt box also installed which also serves as a surge protector, but the installation tech has no way to test and verify that it is still doing the job.  (They apparently can go bad as well.) To have three amps malfunction in the same way (bad memory) can’t be a coincidence unless it was a “bad batch” of amps from the factory, which seems very unlikely for a product with Sonos’ reputation.  A power spike (or dip?) seems the most likely culprit.  Do the amps need more protection?   What do you all have?

All my equipment is housed in a rack inside of a cabinet where the temperature in the rack is warm, around 99⁰.  The specs for the amps indicate an operating temperature range up to 104⁰.  I'm wondering if constant heat can be an issue here even though it’s (slightly) below spec.  Thoughts?

Since the playlists or music are stored on the amps, it’s odd that there’s no mention in the owner’s manual about how much memory an amp has.  Was that increased over the older model and how much memory is there?  How much does this increase its storage capability for playlists and the like?

I noticed that the replacement amps are refurbished.  I know the definition of “refurbish,” but any guess what that means here, since these are the current/latest models.  Why would they need to be refurbished as new as the model is?

Thanks again!

WSC3

I looked under my Sonos app at “About My System” and all of the devices there are W:0 = products are in a wired setup.

65k is the maximum size of a local library, which is a different thing to the playlist limitations in the App

Sonos doesn’t store tracks, they store pointers to where the tracks exist. 65K is, as I understand it, only one of the factors that go in to the size of the data file that Sonos stores to maintain the playlists, but there are other factors involved that can also affect the total amount of memory that Sonos needs to store.

Given that your playlist is much smaller than I would expect that any of those issues might be impacting them, my suspicion is you’re not hitting any of those particular limits, but instead some sort of interruption, possibly wifi interference, or duplicate IP addresses, or something that is stopping the speaker, where the process is occurring, from completing. That’s where I’d be focusing, not so much on the playlist, unless you have egregious amounts of extra metadata in your tracks, such as lyrics, etc.