Albums have suddenly started to behave strangely.

Thanks, actually I’ve already decided not to waste my time. I’ll just put up with poor quality software by a company that couldn’t care less about its customers.

Useful information even if it isn't what we hoped to hear. 

I get the feeling there is a low skilled programmer involved, poking at legacy code they don't fully understand.

Reminds me of me when I got handed a pile of data with some ancient legacy COBOL code and told to stuff it into Oracle and convert it to SQL and c. One huge learning curve, but at least I knew not to mention COBOL in the resume I was typing alongside my code.

Exactly.

I have the same problem.

I also have the same problem and I try to approach it philosophically. One day it will be fixed, or possibly not. A while back I noticed that albums by the band London Grammar had completely disappeared from my library (but were still available via folders). My fix was to remove the word ‘grammar’ (using mp3tag I changed them to London G) and got them back. I tell this tale simply to illustrate how some of the Sonos updates do weird things. I have undone those changes and still have London Grammar in my library. I have a compilation album called ‘Bringing all back home’ that shows up in two duplicates, every track,  before and after  Bob Dylan’s album of the same name. I also have instances exactly of the sort being described here. In more than one instance three duplicates of the same album, with only one track. They show up as they should in folders. It is very frustrating until I summon the energy to be unbothered.

I admire your philosophical approach to issues, which does you (or your therapist) great credit. 

The three identical albums with one track (and no complete version of the partially triplicated album) is one of my favourites.

As someone with a curating mentality, who spends time organising albums, and updating and correcting track tags, it is a particular frustration.

It simply reminds me once more that Sonos have never understood the people who buy their expensive equipment. They aren’t just looking for nice speakers to stream to. I have those and they’re better than Sonos speakers. What I want is something decent to play my own music collection on that works easily and produces decent sound. People who value sonos style systems are likely to own a lot of music.

The catalogue size limit always confused me, for that reason. Not having a turntable for years, similarly. The people who run the company aren’t like it’s core customers - as we noticed notably when they launched an app that broke everyone’s ability to play their own music in order to launch some headphones.

I don’t believe we are their core customers any longer. It’s sad, but I think the fact that this problem has not been fixed yet shows how much we are not. We’re coming up on 1 year since this problem started.

I’ve been a customer for about 20 years. Since 2006 or 7. They’ve moved on, changed and refocussed any number of times in that period.

They’ve probably lost “home streaming delivery” to Google, Apple and Amazon pods, and unless they can reinvent themselves as something different, they’re going to vanish soon. I’d say we’re the best target market they’ve got.