Recent Sonos update is broken on non-ASCII characters in file names

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E
Userlevel 2
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Thanks Corry for the update! I already had the One SL as the prime suspect. Based on snm18’s post, I disconnected the One SL last night, and this night the music index was updated completely. I had planned to do a few more tests to verify that they are the culprits, but thanks to you update I don’t need to.

As it happens, I don’t use my One SL much as they are in the kitchen where I don’t play that often. But nevertheless I’m looking forward to the next update which I hope will have the fix. (Based on the assumption that it is a regression. But maybe it is not? I only got my SLs a month ago, and maybe they became masters of indexing after the upgrade because of some shakeup.)

Corry P
Userlevel 7
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Hi @Erland Sommarskog 

I’m glad to have saved you some trouble!

When indexing, the player that’s “associated” with the controller (a chosen player that the controller app communicates with first) performs the index. Different controllers can have different associated players, so indexing from the app on another device may do the trick. Also, as you’ve experienced, if the associated player is offline then a new one will be chosen for that controller. 

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." - Albert Einstein
E
Userlevel 2
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Thanks, Corry! Yes, I was guessing that it is something like that. Although, it’s a little funny that the Windows controller would associate itself with one of the SLs. Naïvely, I would like to think that it would hook up with the player that is wired to the network. But I guess that the Windows controller does not know those details.

H
Badge +2

I have this problem. I think it’s the same. None of my music will play if either the track name or the folder holding it contains a non-English alphabet character. I have loads like this.The sonos player correctly displays the names but when you ask it to play the track the Sonos Player says ‘Unable to play xxx  -the file xxx cannot be found.’

I tried disconnecting my Sonos One SL as instructed but I still get the error on other speakers. Is there a solution?

I manually updated the music library but it does not fix it for me.

Ken_Griffiths

I have this problem. I think it’s the same. None of my music will play if either the track name or the folder holding it contains a non-English alphabet character. I have loads like this.The sonos player correctly displays the names but when you ask it to play the track the Sonos Player says ‘Unable to play xxx  -the file xxx cannot be found.’

I tried disconnecting my Sonos One SL as instructed but I still get the error on other speakers. Is there a solution?

I manually updated the music library but it does not fix it for me.

Having manually corrected the characters, did you re-index/update your library within the Sonos App?

E
Userlevel 2
Badge +3

I tried disconnecting my Sonos One SL as instructed but I still get the error on other speakers. Is there a solution?

I manually updated the music library but it does not fix it for me.

Did you try reindexing after disconnecting the One SL?

I got a feeling that it might have spread to other players, since I had problem after the most recent update with manual updates from my Windows controller one day. But I did not have time to investigate it, and instead I disconnected my One SL pair, and since then the automatic reindexing has been working correctlyh.

Ken_Griffithis:

Having manually corrected the characters, did you re-index/update your library within the Sonos App?

 

I can’t speak for Harry, but why do you think that the non-English characters would be errors tthat need “correction”? They are certainly not an error in my collection!

Ken_Griffiths

Ken_Griffithis:

Having manually corrected the characters, did you re-index/update your library within the Sonos App?

 

I can’t speak for Harry, but why do you think that the non-English characters would be errors tthat need “correction”? They are certainly not an error in my collection!

I think we are perhaps at cross purposes here.. I haven’t mentioned anything about ‘errors’ in my post, nor did I ever suggest that anything needed correcting?

My post simply asks harrysmith0 if he had re-indexed his library after he stated he had ‘manually’ updated his library. I assumed by that he had altered some of the metadata characters that was causing his tracks to not play. If so he may have needed to re-index his library first, before attempting to play the ‘manually’ updated tracks once again.

S

Hello,

I have the same problem…

I tested to change Synology parameter without success :disappointed_relieved:

Like @Erland Sommarskog , the filenames is correctly showed but folders don’t.

This is a huge problem. There are several of us using the system and I can't leave it as it is.

Any solutions ?

Regards

H
Badge +2

This morning the Sonos App was back to normal. I can now play titles containing non-English characters. Maybe performing a manual Music Library Update stops it working? There will have been an automatic update during the night.

Alan Parkyn
Userlevel 2
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PS. I meant to mention that to find your Associated Product:

1. go to 'About my system' in your Sonos Controller (mobile or desktop)

2. note the IP address of your Associated Product

3. look up that IP address up from your list of Sonos components. If it's a One SL you will have the issue explained in my earlier post and may wish to force a change to a non-One SL component using my work-round.

To state the obvious, my work-around will not work if you system only comprises One SL(s).

As far as I'm aware, it is not possible to set a component as a static Associated Product and so, like for me when I woke up this morning, my Associated Product had changed back to one of my One SLs, which when I re-indexed my music library, made the artists and albums with international characters disappear again. I had to re-do my work-around and got the temporary fix.

A permanent fix is required to fully resolve this issue and I would imagine is a relatively simple fix to get indexing working correctly on a l One SL as it does across all other Sonos components. If Sonos drag their heals then I will be requesting Ones to replace my One SLs.

I hope this helps others.

al_657
E
Userlevel 2
Badge +3

At least I am not alone. :-)

What I have found is that in my case things go wrong with he scheduled update of the music library, but if I start the update manually, either from the Windows controller from my phone, the filenames are read correctly. Or at least so it seems.

But that is certainly weird. My speculation is that when the scheduled update runs, player X runs the indexing, but when I start it manually, it is player Y. And this could happen, because different players have different software, since they are different models. Again, this is pure speculation. I looked port 1400 to see if I could see in the logs which players that have been doing the indexing, but it seems that this information is not exposed anymore.

This is my set of players:

2x Play:3 (and of these two is the only with a network cable).

1 Sub, Gen 1 (paired with the two Play:3)

2xSonos Five

2xPlay:1

2xPlay One SL

1 Port

I should also add that I’m confident that the SMB parameter has nothing to do with. The Min setting must be SMB1. I tried to set it to SMB2, and now Sonos were not able to access the NAS at all.

 

 

 

 

S

I have only two “Sonos One SL” for now.

For now, I launch indexing manually.

I test this night the scheduled!,

We'll see tomorrow morning

E
Userlevel 2
Badge +3

Like mjvanthoor I create playlists every night, and I also have plenty of items with letter outside the ASCII range. However, I don’t have the problem mjvanthoor has, since I use “boring” names. A folder with a playlist has a name like 1665457592_1. (Current Unix time and a running number for the day.). Inside these folders the files are named 01.lnk.mp3, 02.lnk.mp3 etc. Despite the name, they are physical copies of the files. I think I tried to use sym/hardlinks originally, but I did not get it to work. As for having the real titles in the file name - I don’t recall if I ever tried that and it failed because of the character set. And if there were such an issue, was that with Sonos or because I used Perl and Perl is not good with Unicode in file names. It was many years ago, and the system I have works for me. I don’t have to see these boring names in the Sonos application, but here tags, folders etc display correctly without issues.

M

Like mjvanthoor I create playlists every night, and I also have plenty of items with letter outside the ASCII range. However, I don’t have the problem mjvanthoor has, since I use “boring” names. … Despite the name, they are physical copies of the files…

The reason why my setup isn’t working with Sonos is because the filenames in playlest get mangled on import. I’ve gone and just removed all the diatrics from the filenames, and now everything should work. I could also have tried it your way: generating a list of 250 files like I do now, copy those files into a folder with a random guid-like name, and then save the playlist to point to those files.

That would certainly work, but the one thing I don’t like about this setup is that I would need to copy about 3GB of music every night. (About 12 pieces per hour, for 12 hours is 144 pieces; say, 150 for a nice round number, at 20 MB per FLAC file, comes down to around 3GB.)

The strange thing is that Sonos does understand diatrics in file names, because the “normal” playlists (made through the Sonos app) work fine. They just don’t work when importing a playlist from the NAS.

 

E
Userlevel 2
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I don’t use the normal playlists, but do they have the same format as the playlists you have on the NAS? I would guess that they have an internal format.

M

I don’t know the format. They’re just the Sonos app playlists. You add the NAS and it reads the metadata from the files (and the file location, obviously) and then you can add the pieces from your library to a Sonos playlist in the app.

The playlist that is not working correctly (as in: files can’t be found and names are mangled) are just normal M3U text playlists I generate on the NAS.

controlav
Userlevel 7
Badge +23

I don’t use the normal playlists, but do they have the same format as the playlists you have on the NAS? I would guess that they have an internal format.

Sonos playlist are XML files in utf8 format. You can export (and import) them using my iOS app (see profile).

I believe the root of the OPs problem is the encoding of the playlist files, and I don’t know enough about M3U files to speak definitively on that.

Author of the leading independent Sonos app for Windows, the only Sonos app for Xbox, and a Sonos app for iOS
E
Userlevel 2
Badge +3

Nah, it was not that simple. I think incorrectly assumed that the music library already had been updated when I was on the phone with Sonos support. This morning, things were rather worse. The names of the playlists were wrong, and when I tried to play Dire Straits’ second album, Communiqué, selecting it from the Album menu, Sonos could find the file. You may notice the accent in the title (and the name if the file path includes that accent)..

Nevertheless, things are working now. I fooled around and tried various things. While I was at it, I applied the most recent update of DSM, the operating system for the NAS. I don’t know if the upgrade was a required step, or if was just the reboot, or it was some other of the knobs that I tried, but now the file names are displayed properly and the playlists work. Who knows, maybe Sonos and Synology have a conspiracy? :-)

 

M

Hi everyone,

 

Just wanted to let you all know that this issue has been resolved in the latest S2 update (13.3).

 

Please update your players and let us know if you continue experiencing this issue by contacting our customer care team via phone or live chat.

Hi,

I’ve bought three Sonos One SL speakers and this issue has not been completely solved.

There are tracks in the music library on my NAS (which is basically just an Intel NUC that runs a minimal Debian install to provide the music Samba share) that have accented letters in them, both in the metadata and in the file names.

When I import the music library into the Sonos app on iOS, everything seems to be fine: names/titles are correct and files are found and played.

However, this server also generates an m3u playlist every night, with a few hundred random numbers. In the Music Library, this playlist can be found under “Imported Playlists”. When I open this playlist, files that have filenames with accents in them cannot be found, the name is garbled, and the cover image is not loaded.

So the issue may be fixed with regard to library indexing, but not with regard to playlists that are imported from the share. (Songs in the imported playlists that have no non-ascii and no accented characters in them do work as expected.)

 

controlav
Userlevel 7
Badge +23

What encoding is the playlist in? Does it have a BOM? Suggest making it utf8 with a BOM, but I don’t honestly now what formats are supported.

Author of the leading independent Sonos app for Windows, the only Sonos app for Xbox, and a Sonos app for iOS

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