Prominent Collaborator I

Answered

Sonos Playlist Size Limits

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
March 16, 2022
39 replies
2710 views

I have a long playlist (3,295 songs) that won’t load completely on my PC where my music collection is stored. It loads ~ 3,149 each time I try, almost to the exact # of 3,149 each time. When I try to load this playlist via my iPhone, I get an error message “Unable to browse music.” I can load other smaller playlists via my phone and completely via my computer, so the issue must be with the number of songs. I found on the Sonos website that the official Sonos limit is 40,000 songs on all playlists, which is what Sonos will sort. The total songs I have on my iPhone and computer via playlists on Sonos is about 5,000, so I'm nowhere near this threshold.

So what’s the problem here?

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Best answer by buzz

You can think of the music library index as being similar to a card catalog for a library of books. The absolute limit is 65,000 tracks (books). “Metadata” is the track name, artist name, composer, disk file name, etc. that must be written on each card in the catalog. File size is limited by the computer or disk drive, but I doubt that any home user will bump into a hard limit here. You could have a mixture of 65,000 encyclopedias, comic books, and baseball cards in the library.

Continuing the analogy a little, there are a fixed number of drawers in the card catalog. The SONOS system stores the catalog in player RAM. If the Metadata is very large, multiple cards might be needed to save all of the data and eventually you’ll run out of drawers (RAM), possibly before reaching the 65,000 limit. Playlists are also competing for space in the drawers.

Earlier I asked if any tracks seem to be missing from your library. It is possible that there is a stray, invalid character in your Metadata. The library indexer will stumble and stop while processing one of these characters. Users cannot control the order that files are processed and separate runs of the indexer might terminate with a different number of successfully processed tracks.

I suggest that you submit a diagnostic and follow up with SONOS support. If there are network issues or the indexer crashes out early, there will be details in the diagnostic.

Ken_Griffiths

I understand the following limits maybe the case, but this is just from things I’ve picked up in other posts in the community here…

Apparently there is no hard limit for the number of playlists that can be made, but the total number of all tracks in all ‘Sonos’ playlists supposedly may not exceed 10,000.

There are limits too on Imported Playlists, which are:

The maximum size of the queue: 65k tracks
How quickly a playlist loads into the queue, which typically times out after 15 seconds

W

WSC3Author

Prominent Collaborator I

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?

Ken_Griffiths

It seems from your description that when trying to load the playlist it’s either encountering an issue (perhaps with metadata) or it’s timing out - but is this happening with one particular playlist and have you tried another of similar size.

Where are the tracks are stored on the PC and how is the PC attached to the network?

W

WSC3Author

Prominent Collaborator I

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

W

WSC3Author

Prominent Collaborator I

… and it happens with all playlists.

Airgetlam

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.

Bruce

buzz

Grand Maestro

How many tracks are in your library? Are any of these tracks missing from the library index?

Ken_Griffiths

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.

W

WSC3Author

Prominent Collaborator I

I created my playlists elsewhere and import it. Works great but it truncates at just under 3,000 songs. I have a SonosNet connection, and the way it was explained to me is that the songs are uploaded to the cloud and then downloaded to the amps or speakers, i can’t remember which.

Ken_Griffiths

I created my playlists elsewhere and import it. Works great but it truncates at just under 3,000 songs. I have a SonosNet connection, and the way it was explained to me is that the songs are uploaded to the cloud and then downloaded to the amps or speakers, i can’t remember which.

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.

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