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?

 


126 replies

Userlevel 7
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I just talked to Dutch Support, they weren't aware of the problem and they had me run some tests (restarting the system, rebooting the Sonos boxes, copying a music folder with folder.jpg to a different location and re-indexing) but nothing helped. They escalated the problem. If I have any news I'll let you know.

Userlevel 7
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Have been talking to Dutch Support. They confirmed that the new SMB3 protocol (introduced in 13.4) was the culprit. Sonos is working on a solution, but couldn't give a ETA for it.

Userlevel 1
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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

Userlevel 1

I am having a very similar experience since the last Android and Windows 10 update to 13.4, both of which show identical behaviour.

By way of background, all my music files are FLAC, saved in an Artist/Album folder structure on a Synolgy NAS. I have 5 zones, all but 1 wired with Ethernet. 

 

All folders have a folder.jpg cover art file, all of which are 600x600 pixels or less.

The first track of each album also has a copy of folder.jpg embedded in it as I found that this made the Album view load more quickly. For single-artist albums, all other tracks are without cover art.

Compilation albums are in a Compilations folder with Album subfolders and the Album Atrist set to Various Artists.  These folders have a folder.jpg file and the first tracks have a copy of it embedded unless all the tracks have embedded Album art, in which case the folder.jpg file is omitted.  Where tracks don't have cover art embedded in them they default back to the folder image - or did until last week. 

 

This setup has worked perfectly for many months, or even years, until the latest update. 

 

The situation now is that the tracks with embedded images all show up fine on all the relevant screens, but those without do not. 

 

The exception is that, on the Albums screen, no cover art appears for a random selection of albums despite the fact that ALL folders have a folder.jpg file in them and the first tracks in each album ALL have embedded artwork. 

 

This problem is clearly one which a number of us dinosaurs who have music libraries stored locally have already picked up on, and there are doubtless many more who will do so. It's clearly a problem which has crept into the programming of the latest update and needs to be rolled back sooner rather than later.

 

I have submitted diagnostics,  reference 1553940869. 

 

Hoping for a resolution…….

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Yes. I think that it is a little unreasonable. Sonos 13.4 has not been out for two weeks. I started this thread nine days ago. Also, recall that Sonos are located in the US where the passed week was a short week due to Thanksgiving.

To compare, I started thread on a broken update in May, and in this case it took 13 days before from someone Sonos appeared in the thread and confirmed that there was an issue. It took a couple of releases until a fix appeared. That issue only affected Sonos One SL, but in a way it was more severe, as some music files were rendered inaccessible. This time it is after all only cover art.

I also like to point out that Sonos has already confirmed the issue. Even if they have not posted directly to this thread, others have relayed the information.

As for a fix, I can see three options:

  1. Roll back on SMB2/SMB3 support. That should be easy, but there could other improvements that are dependent on this support, so they may not want to do that.
  2. Gives us in option to disable SMB2/SMB3. That would be a very un-Sonos thing to do.
  3. Actually fix the issue. This is of course the desirable long-term solution, but it may also take longer time to roll out.

And, again, it’s only cover art. When I started this thread, my main concern that Sonos might have decided not support folder.jpg at all. I can live with not always seeing covert in my players for a month or so.

 

Userlevel 1

The 13.4.1 system update has sorted the Album Art issues for me although, subjectively, it appears to be a little bit slower than before in serving up the images. Maybe it needs a little time to propagate, as I have rebooted the NAS after changing the file system settings and re-indexed the music library, so we shall see….

I have changed the SMB service settings on my NAS to switch off SMB1 (now running “SMB2, SMB2 and Large MTU, SMB3”), so the security worry is gone too.

Good work, Sonos.  Thank you.

Userlevel 5
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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.

Userlevel 7
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Works find on the few folders  have with just folder.jpg

 

I use MP3Tag to update all my Album art to decent quality images, mainly obtained from Albumartexchange.  It’s take some time to refresh the lot, a year or two!

 

I have had times when the artwork went awol, normally after a system update.  Easily solved in my case by unplugging all my sonos kit, restarting my router and then after 10mins plugging back in all my Sonos kit.

One issue I have noticed is that the App is very impatient. If the artwork is not returned promptly, the controller gives up. I can’t define “prompt” and I don’t know if the delay is caused by bumbling inside the App, the device running the App, or out on the network. WiFi interference could be a contributor, but this leaves tracks in a diagnostic.

Problem solved with the latest update version 14.6

Hello together,

I have the same problem. No album covers (folder.jpg in the corresponding directories on my Synology) have been displayed since the last Sonos update.
Restarts and other nonsense did not help. Apparently, Sonos made another bug here.
Please pass it on to the developers and fix it as soon as possible.

I suggest that everyone experiencing this issue submit diagnostics and follow-up directly with Support or here.

Pure speculation on my part is that there is a timing issue, probably related to communication delays between controller and player. Check the Associated Product for the controller that you are using as I suggested above. It is possible that one Association is struggling with communication. You do not have much control over which unit will become the the Associated Product.

For systems with only one wired network connection, the communication path can become quite contorted for floder.jpg. For example if ‘A’ is wired and the controller is Associated with ‘D’, it is possible that the communication path to folder.jpg could be: Controller - ‘D’ - ‘C’ - ‘B’ - ‘A’ - folder.jpg - ‘A’ - ‘B’ - ‘C’ - ‘D’ - Controller and I can’t speculate exactly how the controller might connect with ‘D’ or how ‘A’ might connect to folder.jpg.

A communication issue along the path to folder.jpg will introduce delays. Historically, the system has worked through all of this without bothering the user. It’s possible that previous releases had an artwork timeout of ‘x’ and this release has a timeout of ‘x/n’ and the system cannot respond fast enough.

Communication issues leave tracks in the diagnostics.

Another potential variable is how Groups are built. The first member of a Group becomes the Group’s “Coordinator” and all music for the Group passes through the Coordinator. If the Coordinator is struggling with communication, all players in the Group will suffer and overall system data flow will slow -- potentially introducing further delay in folder.jpg fetch. Building the Group in a different order might improve this sort of situation. Again, all of this leaves tracks in the diagnostics.

Userlevel 7
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I'm happy to report that my system just updated to 13.4.1 and my cover art has returned. 

Userlevel 2
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Apparently no Sonos employee floating around. :worried:

Could the fact that it’s Sunday have something to do with it?

I don’t know how vigorously Sonos staff monitors these forums, but when I brought up an issue a couple of months back, it took more than a week before a Sonos person appeared in the thread. (And confirmed that it was a known issue.)

 

Userlevel 2
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Yeah, I also noticed that a few people mentioned Synology. And guess what: I also have my music library on a NAS from Synology.

Userlevel 1

Several contributors have raised the Synology question. 

For what It's worth, I have been running my library on the same Synolgy NAS for two years or so and album art has always shown up perfectly. It is only since the controller update last week that this changed behaviour has been evident, and yes, I have done player and router reboots, re-installed the controllers etc. 

It simply cannot be coincidental that the display of album art worked perfectly before the update and, since the update, consistently fails to work.

It has to be a programming change, probably a very simple one, that has caused this change in functionality. Let's hope its equally simply fixed. 

Userlevel 7

No sure if this is helpful, but I have some “folder.jpg” album cover files in my album folders and the artwork still loads correctly for me on 13.4. My music library is stored on an old iMac and I am running the Sonos app on an iPhone SE (2020).

Userlevel 2
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Have been talking to Dutch Support. They confirmed that the new SMB3 protocol (introduced in 13.4) was the culprit. Sonos is working on a solution, but couldn't give a ETA for it.

Thanks for that update!

I made some testing on my Synology NAS. I had it set to SMB1 minimum and SMB3 maximum. I changed that so that minimum was SMB2 with large MTU. At first music did not play, but it was sufficient to restart the Windows controller for the music to start playing. Still no cover art. Then I changed the setting to SMB1 as both minimum and maximum. Cover art are now starting to show up. Not only in Imported Playlists, but also in Albums where I did not see it before.

Since SMB3 support is certainly a welcome addition (and much belated), I’m prepared to cut Sonos some slack for things not working perfectly the first time.

 

Most likely why Sonos hasn’t ‘announced’ the SMB version upgrade. It appears to be mostly, but not completely, working. I’d imagine their engineers are working overtime trying to figure out this issue, which may not have shown up in beta testing, given the numbers of people testing. At least, having run a fair number of betas for gaming software and not having a bug show up until it was released to everyone, that is what I’d assume. 

Userlevel 7

Hi

@Airgetlam makes a valid point about  “bugs” and how they are discovered and subsequently resolved. It’s important to understand that when dealing with multiple types of end-user hardware; testers look at general realities that cover most scenarios in the real world. There will always be those one-off scenarios that weren’t covered.

For example…writing code to auto alphabetize common last names that works 99.9 % of the time; but fails when a hyphenated last name is introduced. That’s a bug that the code writer didn’t take into account and therefore must enter a “what-if” line to fix the bug encountered by the end-user of the software. 

As mentioned by @Airgetlam …that’s probably the case here-in-point. 

Userlevel 2
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One of the issues on teams I’ve worked on is that often people forget to make allowances for what are considered in the US “non-standard” characters, such as many languages around the world actually use, and are considered “standard” there. 

Not sure whether that’s the case here, just an example of unintentional bias that might not be caught by the assumed “small” number of beta testers.

I can’t really see that this the issue in this case. But interesting enough, the issue I ran into in May was exactly that. Sonos One SL players botched non-ASCII characters when they indexed the music library. But for folder problem, I have not see any such correlation.

Userlevel 2
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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).

Userlevel 5
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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.

@jreddaway thanks for the feedback - did you also disable the NTLMv1 Authentication (under Advanced Settings - Other)?

Userlevel 1

Hi @el rubio 

No, I didn’t turn off the NTLMv1 Authentication - I didn’t even know it was there, let alone what it does!

Cheers, 

John

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