Music Library Out of Sync

P
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I have ripped a number of CDs onto my computer’s hard drive and then organized them by Artist/Title. I then updated my Music Library. What I’m seeing in the Sonos app is that some albums appear fine, but there’s a significant number of albums with title “Unknown Album.” Some of the unknown albums are duplicates of correctly labeled albums. I thought syncing my hard drive with Sonos would be simple and straightforward, but I’m now looking at two different representations of my music, some unknown, some duplicates without names. BTW, I Removed and Added my Music Library to Sonos, but that did not correct anything.

Can someone offer suggestions as to why the disconnect between my Music Library and Sonos’ misrepresentation? Thanks in advance.

19 replies

Stanley_4
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Many possibilities. What kind of computer would help folks give better answers. Also how you are sharing the music.

Did you leave music in a recycle bin that is shared with Sonos?

Do you have any characters that Sonos doesn’t care for in your directories / files?

You’ll get much better answers if you give us more information.

P
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Hi Stanley,

Thank you for your response. To answer your questions:

  1. I’m running Windows 10 Pro on a high-end PC.
  2. My music is stored in a folder with subfolders for each album. The subfolders are listed by artist, with subfolders for each album. For example,

D:\Music\My Music Library\Celine Dion\Let’s Talk About Love.

  1. I share my Music Library using the Sonos App > Manage > Adding the path to my Library:

My Music Library, Path: D:\Music\My Music Library

  1. There are albums and songs in my Recycle Bin stemming from organizing my folders and albums.
  2. I don’t use any special characters other than the “&” sign, as in “Simon & Garfunkel.”

I think I’ve covered everything you asked for. If not, fire away! And most importantly, thanks for your offer to help.

Steve

Stanley_4
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The recycle bin may be your issue, if the reindex is seeing things there it will try to add them too.

You do have the Sonos App loaded on the Windows system? I don’t use it but I understand it is preferred to using an SMB file share. This process should be running in the background: SonosLibraryServer.exe

https://support.sonos.com/en-us/downloads

 

If nothing else try again and then submit a diagnostic, then call Sonos support to have them look at the, hidden from us users, internal data.

P
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Stanley,

I emptied my Recycle Bin and Removed and Added My Music Library so that my Sonos Desktop is looking at the most recent music folders. Unfortunately, I still have a slew of “Unknown Artists.”

I am running the most current Sonos S2 desktop application. 

My next approach is to delete My Music Library and restore it from my backup (before I tried to tidy up by organizing everything by Artist/Album. To the best of my recollection (I now sound like a lawyer, which I’m not), the problem began after I ripped and loaded about 50 albums yesterday and began organizing them. I will update my post with my findings.

Thanks once again for your guidance.

bockersjv
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I would use MP3Tag, free (it works on all music formats) to check how the tags have been set up.

P
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Well, I restored My Music Library from an old backup, but the results are the same: Unknown Album - Unknown Artist. The backup was created a few years ago, before I began Ripping my own CDs; however, the albums were Ripped by a friend, and I don’t know what methodology he used. It seems odd that both his Rips and my Rips would experience the same issues.

Later today, I will Rip one album, store it in a new Library and see if it generates the same errors. If it does, then I will have to contact Sonos Tech Support as it could be a software bug. I will post my results first to keep you in the loop.

P
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I re-Ripped 9 CDs and loaded them into a virgin folder, and then Added the new folder to Sonos Music Library on my desktop computer. So far, no extraneous unknowns! I hate to say it, but now I’m faced with re-Ripping more than 100 CDs - 50 from yesterday and more than 50 that my friend Ripped several years ago. I have not rearranged any of the Artists or Albums, which may have caused the problem, although I can’t readily see why. I have a theory but will wait until I complete Ripping more CDs before sharing. in case I’m wrong. Again, I will let you know if the new library becomes corrupt like the old one.

S
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In theory, although I don't advise it, all the tracks could be in one folder - the Sonos library is only interested in tags. It's not so good for dealing with things like a ‘Greatest Hits’ album by ‘Various’ artists.

When you remove the share I assume it all disappears.  When you add it again, if you then get the issue then the duplicates have to be in that Share.  I don't believe the Sonos library can have two entries for the same physical file so there must be duplicates that are accessible..

The troubleshooting options available to users in these instances (even seeing path names for library entries) is severely limited.

controlav
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The file paths don’t matter a damn, in fact you will save memory in the Sonos database by using eg c:\music\a\b\c\d.mp3 instead of the example you quoted. It is the mp3 Tags that are important when displaying data for the files, not the pathnames.

Author of the leading independent Sonos app for Windows, the only Sonos app for Xbox, and a Sonos app for iOS
S
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Could be worth removing the Celine Dion folder too.

And keep it like that. 😁

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bockersjv

I downloaded MP3tag at your suggestion. Thanks. Its user interface seems more flexible with options than what I’ve been using. Thank you for the recommendation.

 

P
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For those who have been watching and contributing to this thread, thank you. As promised, here is my theory (right or wrong) and my going forward strategy.

Theory:

There are under-the-cover connectors between Artist and Album, and when I moved Albums to another folder I broke these connections which created unknown entities.

Strategy:

Even though my Music Library plays fine on my desktop and in my cars, I’ve decided to trash my old Music Library and start anew, re-Ripping over 100 CDs. I’ve begun the process and ripped 11 CDs so far, checking periodically to see if the Sonos app detects any broken links. So far, so good. There may be an easier approach, but for me proceeding down the simple path seems less traumatic.

S
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If you read the points made above you will hopefully accept your theory and strategy are wrong. Moving files will not and cannot create unknown entities.

Answering my question regarding removing the Share and is the library empty and then re-adding, do the issues reappear would help.

P
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sjw, 

I don’t understand “removing the Share.”

What I have noticed is that the unknown Artists and unknown Albums only appear in my Sonos Apps (desktop and iPhone). I have tried deleting them but have not found a way to do it. (Repeating from my previous post: the Library plays fine on my desktop and in both cars; only Sonos is an issue.)

Stanley_4
Userlevel 7
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I’d recommend ripping your CDs in a lossless format (FLAC is good) to a master directory, outside of any Sonos sharing. The files there to remain just as ripped.

Make a copy of the ripped files and use your tag editor to populate the tags as you would like them. Also fetch any album art you wish to have present. If you blow something up here you can go to the master copy and recover it. Tweak any tags, file names or paths that need to be adjusted to meet Sonos requirements here too.

Make a third copy from the altered files above and use that for your music library.

Consider also trans-coding the modified music collection to a lossy format for use directly in other audio devices. My car only holds a small part of my music in FLAC but holds most of it in MP3 and I keep some favorites on my travel laptop.

With the master copy, tweaked copy as your sources you have the ability to make further copies and alterations while always being able to replace any destroyed data with a simple copy.

I keep both of the copies mentioned here on an off-line storage device to prevent loss if there is a catastrophic event destroying connected hardware.

 

P
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Stanley_4,

My background is in computer software development and hardware design, but working with music files is a new experience for me. I’m not familiar with lingo, such as Tag Editor and trans-coding. In such situations I often opt for simple solutions, although sometimes they require more work. Saturday was a rainy day, a good day for ripping CDs. I finished ripping all my CDs: 895 files, 155 folders, 7,596,576,768 bytes. The are no errors, and no unknown anythings. Life is good as long as I don’t try to move files around.

I sincerely appreciate all your posts, suggestions and encouragement. Thank you very much.

Stanley_4
Userlevel 7
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Tag editor: https://www.mp3tag.de/en/index.html

Trans-coding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcoding

Ripping can be great fun (not) but it can be made less painful. The Tag Editor will let you update the internal data in the audio files making them more Sonos (and other players) friendly. Batch mode is a huge time saver there.

Trans-coding to lower quality is really handy.

Flac: 131.3 GiB 8,410 files, 637 sub-folders (NAS / Sonos version)

MP3: 29.6 GiB (Honda internal drive version)

 

I actually bought a computer (old outdated but 10 cores) and added a bunch of SATA CD drives to rip from. It would happily rip 7 CDs at a time and all I had to do was wait for a drive to pop open and stick in a fresh CD, then click the rip button for that drive again. Amazing how quickly it ran through my CD library. Passed it on to a son that needs a number cruncher for his audio projects.

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Stanley_4,

Thanks for the homework assignment. I will look into the referenced links. I appreciate your sharing all this good information. I can imagine what you are saying based on my software development experiences of a bygone era. 

Steve

Stanley_4
Userlevel 7
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I too used to do software development, mostly Unix at work and ‘80 assembler at home.

I still do home-brew hardware stuff although I’m much fonder of the Raspberry Pi than wire-wrapping a Z-80 SBC. 

 

To whet your appetite here is a screenshot from a tag editor, EasyTag, that I use on Linux.

 

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