14.2 not playing any songs with special characters from the local library... AGAIN?!

It is a recurring problem and seems to be associated with updating the music library index.

It's the Beam. I can't initiate playback of special character titles from the Beam. Works with the other players.

Hi @Luc45 

Thanks for updating the thread with that info!

I was not aware that this issue had come back, but it appears with the Beam (Gen 2), it is indeed a known issue which we are working on getting fixed.

Hopefully, it will be resolved soon.

Hello, I have been reading that this issue is fixed but it is not, not at least for me! 

I have 13.2.3 S2, build 64321150, using WD My Cloud.

The name of the song is: Alazán - Digan Lo Que Digan - 05 - Vete. (Note the accent on the second “a”). I get the following message when I try to play it from the “PLAYLISTS”.

I CANNOT play it.

However, I am able to play the same song from “ARTISTS” (or SONGS, etc.): That is how the list of songs appears in Sonos when using PLAYLISTS: 

BUT in ARTISTS, here is what I see

It looks fine and I can play it!

HELP!!!! Thank you….

My solution sucks but it works, did it many years ago when I lost patience.

I used a mass FLAC editor to make new copies of all my music files and to replace all accented characters with un-accented ones. I still have the originals and some day it may be safe to switch back to them.

That is not right of Sonos users to have to do such acrobatics! In fact, I did DUPLICATE part of my library due to the HARD-CODED limitation on the memory in the speakers. 

I was thinking to do what you said to my list but I thought, there must be an easier solution somewhere that Sonos can finally fix it for good. Hopefully...

Thanks Stanley_4!

***** PROBLEM SOLVED *****

While the excellent Sonos team was gathering information from me to help resolve this, I have spent some time myself researching and troubleshooting the issue. Since this only happens with playlists, I looked into how iTunes generates the .M3U files. It seems they have some "hidden" characters or some different mapping (!) when it comes to non-standard English letters.

So, I copied the content of the iTunes-generated .M3U file and copied it into a new .TXT file. I then changed .TXT to .M3U.

Et voilà,.... it worked !!!