And scratch that. It’s finally indexed. One question I would ask though- is it quicker when reindexing and looking for changes? Just wondering if it was a lot slower as it was the first time this new drive had been indexed?

Yes, it is much (much) quicker after the initial indexing.

Indexng from my laptop (Itunes library) seems to be taking longer and longer and yet the libarary has increased significantly.  

It used to take c.10-15 mins

These days its approaching an hour ? !

And frustratingly,  you cannot view the progress of the update.  Or am I missing something ?

Sorry ...should read the Library “has not increased significantly”.

It might have needed to reindexed all due to the changes to the SMB version support perhaps? - Maybe see if it’s quicker next time.

Thanks Ken...but I gave up at 3 hours. Will try again at some point.  

I'm sure this has been addressed elsewhere but it would be handy to have some form of visual progress bar to indicate how far through the indexing process, Sonos has got.

It doesn't know how long it will take until it has done it. Ever seen the progress bar for a big file copy over the network in Windows? Same problem 

Give me a moment, I will remove my library completely from the Sonos App - The library is stored on a wired (netgear) NAS on a gigabit network and has 25,750 tracks (approx.) I will see how long it takes to index it to give you an idea of the time, so you can compare.

It took the Sonos App 14 minutes to index 25,746 tracks in my own test here.

Not sure it is related, but if you look at my post about the NAS connections, it seems like Sonos creates so many during indexing and/or browsing that it exceeded  the max connections. This resulted  in my music scan taking forever. I never had this problem until I updated the FW a few days ago, but I did also add a new speaker at the same time.

If you are able, run the smbstatus utility on your NAS and see how many connections you have, and then take a look at your smb.conf and see if there is a max connection limit. Not sure why Sonos needs so many connections, but if it exceeds you get a lot of strange behavior like long indexing times and skippped playback.

It makes a difference as to which Sonos device is doing the indexing. Different devices have different CPUs and memory, so some will do it more quickly than others. And no, I’m not familiar with any way to force one device to do it over another, save unplugging all the ones I don’t want it to run on. 

my two cents: starting from scratch with a new path defined and ‘fresh’ copy of music tracks on your NAS will obviously take the longest time, however, the NAS performance and network congestion play a role her as well - I mostly initiate a reindexing from my Mac mini which is wire connected - if you want to run the reindexing during off-peak hours, you may opt for the scheduled updates

Note that it isn’t the Mac mini which is doing the re-indexing, it’s a Sonos device that does that, via its connection to the NAS via SMB. 

Thanks everyone for their input.

However I'm afraid a lot of it has gone over my head. 

Can anyone offer advice to a non techy like me ? Does Sonos offer a service ?

Just to recap I undertake the Indexing via WiFi from my 9 year old laptop where my music collection is stored on ITunes. 

I have not had problems with Indexing before when it normally takes about 20mins. There are c. 3,000 tracks.

Recently I have started getting the encoding response to several tracks which spoils the playback of playlists by stopping tracks and skipping to the next track.

Thanks again in advance.

hi @no1SteveB Sonos offers a support service if you submit a request or diagnostic report - with regards to the indexing, I would suggest to verify the condition of the tracks with issues: the file could be corrupt or the metadata (i.e. additional information about the track, author, genre and album artwork) incorrect - this can be verified with iTunes or or the Apple Music app