Sonos Playlist Size Limits

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.

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.

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:

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.

Should I try Sonos support?  Would they be of help?

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. 

I think I’ve decided that I’m a victim of the 15 second load rule, a limitation that baffles me from a top-notch product like Sonos.  I'm loading into my PC app from a solid state drive, so I have no idea why it would even take that long, but nonetheless, any idea why so low a threshold for a timeout?  And are they planning a fix for this?

I have also discovered that I can create the entire playlist by adding two smaller playlists together and then saving it as a Queue in Sonos Playlists.  It’s sad that I need a workaround, but all 3,400 songs load in a couple of seconds, what I would have expected to load externally.

Also, there’s a small limit of Queues that can be saved as a Sonos Playlist, like 4.  I was sent an error message to delete one of the current Queues, but there’s no option to delete.  How do I remove the Queues that I don't want?  And why is this threshold of four so low??

Thanks again….

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. 

I'm waiting on a call-back from Sonos, but your points are good ones.  They gave me a case number and I'm waiting. 

What's puzzling me is that my system is all hardwired according to my Sonos system information. I’ve had the non-standard character issue and resolved those, so I know what you mean.  If they have a 15 second limit, then the process must be expected to move a lot faster than it does. 

I'm using playlists not favorites.  I will attempt to embed the display screen I get when I try to save a new Queue.  No delete button.  And a limit, apparently of 4 lists.  They’re all about 200kb each.

Thanks so much.

WSC