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music library indexing suddenly unreliable--Sonos S1 with WD NAS drive

  • February 13, 2026
  • 4 replies
  • 31 views
S

Is there a reason that my music library indexing in my Sonos S1 is becoming unreliable?  A couple of months ago, I noticed that new additions to the library were not showing up after indexing.  The bug continues, as I just copied several albums to my NAS drive, indexed the volume, and could not find any of the new items when I searched on any of the criteria (Artist, Song, Composer, Folder, etc.). After a couple of restarts and several re-indexing attempts, some songs/albums appeared in my searches, but not all.  The songs were all from the same copying-over pass, they were all valid tunes from Apple Music, and they were all .m4a files.  Nothing different between them, but some showed up and some didn’t.  

I have now restarted my Mac and rebooted the NAS drive again, and done another indexing pass, and, finally, all of my most recent music files appear in my search.

So, the question is: why is this happening, and is this the new normal for “old” S1 systems using a NAS?

 

Thanks,

 

steve

Best answer by Airgetlam

Hard to tell from the description. Normally, I’d suggest an issue with SMB being turned off by an update to your NAS, but that would stop everything, and it wouldn’t be ‘partial’, or periodic, it would just stop working. 

What I would recommend that you submit a system diagnostic within 10 minutes of running a library update process, and call Sonos Support to discuss it. Don’t post the resulting diagnostic number here, Sonos’ lawyers get sensitive about GDPR, I suspect. And have data about which things aren’t showing up, so that they can look at specific cases, something we in the public can’t. 

There may be information included in the diagnostic that will help Sonos pinpoint the issue and help you find a solution.

When you speak directly to the Support staff, they have tools at their disposal that will allow them to give you advice specific to your network and Sonos system.

 

4 replies

Airgetlam
  • Airgetlam
  • Answer
  • February 14, 2026

Hard to tell from the description. Normally, I’d suggest an issue with SMB being turned off by an update to your NAS, but that would stop everything, and it wouldn’t be ‘partial’, or periodic, it would just stop working. 

What I would recommend that you submit a system diagnostic within 10 minutes of running a library update process, and call Sonos Support to discuss it. Don’t post the resulting diagnostic number here, Sonos’ lawyers get sensitive about GDPR, I suspect. And have data about which things aren’t showing up, so that they can look at specific cases, something we in the public can’t. 

There may be information included in the diagnostic that will help Sonos pinpoint the issue and help you find a solution.

When you speak directly to the Support staff, they have tools at their disposal that will allow them to give you advice specific to your network and Sonos system.

 

Bruce
buzz
  • buzz
  • February 14, 2026

How many tracks are in your library?

Stanley_4
  • Stanley_4
  • Grand Maestro
  • February 14, 2026

Sometimes you see a difference depending on which speaker you are connected to when you start the index. Sonos may change the index generator based on some internal conditions but it may help if you select a newer speaker and one with a strong connection before starting the index process.

If you have a Bridge active in your system you might try removing it as they can cause odd errors. Either switch to wifi or connect another Sonos to Ethernet. 

buzz
  • buzz
  • February 14, 2026

The user cannot control the order of file processing in a library share. If the indexer encounters an issue, such as an invalid character in the data, the indexer will stop. Since the processing order may vary from run to run, the tracks included will vary. Newly added tracks tend to be processed later and tend to attract the user’s attention.

In addition to the absolute 65K track limit, there is a space limit for the index. Classical libraries with long file names and verbose track titles, may hit the space limit before the track count limit.

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