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.

Show previous replies

W

WSC3Author

Prominent Collaborator I

How do I do that? I think I was moved TO the SonosNet because it was faster, but i’m not sure…. Please say more!

buzz

Grand Maestro

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.

Ken_Griffiths

How do I do that? I think I was moved TO the SonosNet because it was faster, but i’m not sure…. Please say more!

What @buzz says - and also see this link too:

https://support.sonos.com/s/article/3209

W

WSC3Author

Prominent Collaborator I

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.

W

WSC3Author

Prominent Collaborator I

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.

Ken_Griffiths

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.

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

W

WSC3Author

Prominent Collaborator I

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….

Airgetlam

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.

Bruce

Ken_Griffiths

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….

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.

Ken_Griffiths

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).

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