Sonos no longer recognizing folder.jpg for cover art?


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After the most recent upgrade to Sonos 13.4 (S2), I don’t see much cover art in the Sonos controller. More precisely, it seems that I see cover art if it is embedded into the MP3 file, but not if the cover art in a separate file called folder.jpg. In my collection, most albums have a folder.jpg, and only a minority of albums have embedded cover art. There are two reasons for this:

  • Albums that originally had on CD, cassette or vinyl.
  • For several years, Sonos was not able to display cover art that was embedded into the MP3 files that I bought, so I had to extract them to folder.jpg and remove them from the MP3 file.

Is any one else seeing this? Or is this just some accident on my system?

 


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@Stanley_4 all that being on a Synology NAS using SMBv2/v3 ?

 

I’m using Synology DSM 6.2.4-25556 Update 2 and I can flip between SMB’s without any fuss, even while music is playing. There is no need to re-index my library.

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Album art issue is definitely still present in 13.4.1. Also, Sonos no longer switches to Dark Mode to match Android, and the Appearance setting that's supposed to control this has vanished. Thus far, not impressed with 13.4.1.

Okay, this is embarassing. The good news: Android controller did switch back to dark mode. The embarassing news: my fully tagged and album-arted mp3 collection wasn't as fully tagged and album-arted as I thought. I’d gone through a major effort to get it all straightened out, and thought it had worked, so all album art issues in the controller were obviously Sonos’ fault.

Discovered yesterday that a significant portion of my files were still a mess, tag- and artwise. Fixed it all, and now… lo and behold… album art loads! I've watched with joy as every single piece of album artwork appeared on its album in the Android controller as I slowly scrolled through the whole list.

With two caveats:

  1. It's still very slow, up to a second per album, sometimes more. Starting at the top and scrolling down fast before stopping halfway down the list, album art takes forever to show up. As if the controller insists on loading the album art for all the albums I've speed-scrolled past before loading the albums stationary in my screen.
  2. It seems to be highly depended on consistent album-level tagging. Files in a folder don't necessarily have to have all album-level tags filled, but if they are, they must be perfectly consistent: album name, album artist, disc number, artwork, and possibly other fields as well. 

Anywayz, it seems like the issue is really fixed in 13.4.1 (except the slow performance).

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One observation, not directly related to album art, but well to SMB2/SM3, and I’m too lazy to start a thread.

I have had some problems lately with adding imported playlists to the queue. I’ve added them, and after some seconds it has said that the last track could not be found, and nothing was entered. I’ve needed a couple of attempts. I’ve had some other problems recently which indicates that more general network problems, so it may not be related to SMB2/SMB3, but it seems that things work better since I re-enabled SMB1 on my NAS. It’s still a little funny, because if I add three albums (i.e playlists), it first says that the queue is only the songs on the first album, but the others shows up later.

Maybe Sonos still have some fine-tuning to do with their SMB2/SMB3 support.

 

 

I find that album art fetch is much slower on SMB2 and the SONOS controllers can be impatient. If the controller times out default artwork will be displayed. I don’t use imported playlists and therefor have no experience with missing tracks.

The last missing track could be due a classic programming flub. If items in list ‘A’ are numbered 0-1-2-3-4-5 and list ‘B’ is numbered as 1-2-3-4-5-6, how many itiems are in each list? An obviouls way to determine this is to use the top number as the list length. Unfortunately, this results in list ‘A’ having a length of ‘5’ and list ‘B’ having a length of ‘6’.

maybe I am just lucky or have more patience but I added my 25k tracks music library on my Synology NAS and all album art displayed well - same for the flac and mp3 directories I added - maybe this is because I only use macOS and Apple gear or my Sonos speakers are relatively new

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album art loads! I've watched with joy as every single piece of album artwork appeared on its album in the Android controller as I slowly scrolled through the whole list.

Laughed too soon. No idea why it worked for a little while on Thursday. Problem is back in all its glory today. Even going back to SMB1 doesn't fix it.

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Welcome to the “sometimes” club, mine come and go too.

Just to make it more frustrating the queue entries often get images while the currently playing image is blank.

I haven’t done a full-system power off and back on yet, maybe that would help?

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Album Art is very erratic for me also. Definitely a controller issue - almost like an afterthought for the software or if it times out displaying simply gives up until there is another input to the controller. Comically my ancient iPad 1 with Sonopad will always display the artwork faithfully (I use this to display the song playing only)

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Contacted support again. Issue is known and still under investigation. 13.4.1 was not intended to contain a solution, it seems.

EDIT: And switching back to SMB1 doesn't seem to help any longer.

 

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Read the above posts and am experiencing the same inconsistency and lag in loading album art. Best is app on Windows, everything else slow and often just never actually loads. Wired Boost set up rock solid on S1, but I've just ditched my original 2005/6 system for upgrade, supposedly, two weeks ago.

Sound definitely better, but the glitches, and there are plenty, are making me look towards decently quality wireless speakers and small streaming all in one as I only do music and not surround TV etc.

When you use your android constantly to find different music, the covers and album art are a real visual short cut, so just staring at text is not really a help. Sonos need to sort it soon. 

Same issue for me. At most, up to 2 albums artwork loads per artist and then stops trying.

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Same issue for me. At most, up to 2 albums artwork loads per artist and then stops trying.

I’ve been fine the last couple of weeks but there are times when I experience the same. Hoping the next update will help with this a few other issues.

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Yes, same for me, just a wait I guess.

Tweaked a couple of settings on NAS, set up a completely separate shared folder just for music so Sonos app only reads that and not ALL media. A little more consistent, but not at the rock solid delivery of S1. Noticed quite a bit of comment on NAS forums that SMB version 2/3 were thought to be issues with S2.

 

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Any progress on this problem. I still have the issue of sporadic or non existent artwork.

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Not for me, only my library that plays up, Spotify and Amazon no problem. Recent S2 v. 14 update has not affected this issue.

 

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Not for me, only my library that plays up, Spotify and Amazon no problem. Recent S2 v. 14 update has not affected this issue.

 

No, nor me I was hoping for a resolution with 14.0. Just goes to show how much Sonos have moved to streaming away from their local library customers. If this had of been a problem with streaming art it would have been fixed ages ago. Very disappointing.

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Not for me, only my library that plays up, Spotify and Amazon no problem. Recent S2 v. 14 update has not affected this issue.

 

No, nor me I was hoping for a resolution with 14.0. Just goes to show how much Sonos have moved to streaming away from their local library customers. If this had of been a problem with streaming art it would have been fixed ages ago. Very disappointing.

At the risk of being branded a heretic, I find that Sonopad is much better at handling album art. I’m late to this thread so apologies if someone else already noted this

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Not for me, only my library that plays up, Spotify and Amazon no problem. Recent S2 v. 14 update has not affected this issue.

 

No, nor me I was hoping for a resolution with 14.0. Just goes to show how much Sonos have moved to streaming away from their local library customers. If this had of been a problem with streaming art it would have been fixed ages ago. Very disappointing.

At the risk of being branded a heretic, I find that Sonopad is much better at handling album art. I’m late to this thread so apologies if someone else already noted this

Your right Sonopad never fails to show or update the artwork.

Problem solved with the latest update version 14.6

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Problem solved with the latest update version 14.6

Looks like it's much, much less erratic in this version.

Came here to post that I had a one-time succes in 14.4, album art loading like lightning while scrolling through the album art, only to disappear again upon scrolling back up.

In 14.4, scrolling down loads almost all artwork, and scrolling back up does so as well.

Some albums still get skipped, and I don’t think it was a sensible design choice to load the entire list of album art when I rapidly scroll several screens down (why not load only the artwork needed in the visible bit of the list?). And they're still not caching album art, but reloading. And in the little play bar, album art doesn't load at all, even when I expand it, click through to the track list, and allow the art work to load for all tracks. (Oddly enough, when I return to the album list and scroll dozens of screens up to see the album that's currently in the playlist, the album art for that album alone does display, even as I wait tens of seconds for the other artwork to show up--that's loading from the bottom.)

Who knows, maybe they got it licked?

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Yep, 

Haven't posted since just after 14.4. 14.6 by comparison seems much better for Android when it comes to owns canned album art. Spotify etc was never an issue.

A better experience all together. 

Just for info... I set scanner to scan just slightly larger than booklet and 800 dpi. Then use MS Paint to crop square and reduce pixels to 600 x 600 which gives me final image anything. between 200 - 300 kb. Good for ipad and Android phone which is what mainly use. Looks as sharp as Spotify images to my eyes. 

 

I unplugged all players. (But not the router, that makes no sense). I plugged them in again. I updated the music index. No change. Still no cover pixel art for albums where there is a single folder.jpg in the folder (as stated in the article buzz linked to).

So it seems like Sonos broke something. These are my zones:

A: 2 Play3 + 1 Sub (Gen one). One of the Play3 is connected with network cable to the router.

B: Port.

C: Two Sonos Five

D: Two Sonos One SL

E: Two Play1.

 

 

 

Thank you

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Have you tried restarting NAS (I know many of us have them on constantly).

I have found that re-indexing Sonos Music Library via app sometimes is ineffective, if my QNAP hasn't had an update and consequent re-boot for a while…

 

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It's a bug in the Sonos app, which I would be very happy to see fixed.

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