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Hi Sonos fam -

New user since last year and am generally happy with the ecosystem and even the new app (although I am sometimes confused as to where I am exactly when swiping up or down and what thing is playing to what speaker or whatever)…There’s a lot of swiping, screens and icons and sh*t...”View System” takes you to a screen that looks nearly identical to other screens that I would also consider “viewing” the “system”...but anyway...It’s probably my most used app or at least in the top 5...

...now that NAS is back, I’m using it. I have a simple older SSD attached to a router via USB and it seems to be working at least at the moment. Took a lot of fiddling with my router seetings to figure out how to make it work….I find networking to be needlessly overcomplicated and over-jargonated. 

I’m trying to see if there is any expanded article/info on using NAS for SONOS. The stuff you do to add your “music library” in the app is basically 1 sentence and if you can’t figure it out you seem kinda f*cked so I guess I’m lucky I got that part figured out… I just want to know if there are better ways to do things. Limits on space? How is it indexing my library exactly? I mean where? Is it storing an index on my phone?? on a speaker? Which speaker? On a SONOS sever? Huh? How long does it take to do this? I don’t have any idea how it’s working and I’d like to know more… NAS really is handy… Happy it’s working...just want to know if there are any cool things I can do with this...

I can provide some answers, although some may be ‘fuzzy’.

Almost all Sonos data is stored on each Sonos device in your system, and not in the controller device/application. This means each playlist summary (not the music itself, just a list of data pointing to where the music exists) is stored on each Sonos speaker. This means it’s subject to the oldest/least amount of memory in your system, and the potential processing time associated with each devices CPU. You’ll see thinks about ‘limits’ on playlists, but they’re more associated with available memory, and are a combination not only of the title and location of the file(s), but also some other ‘tags’ associated with the file data. So if the titles of the file get long, or there are lyrics involved, etc, all of that impacts how ‘many’ can be stored in a Sonos playlist. Each streamer also has set limits, and are often set by the time it takes to connect and to download the data, Sonos does have a timeout associated with data downloading of playlists, it isn’t an infinite time. 


You can’t see your internal NAS related information but it is included with a Diagnostic. If you wait until support isn’t so backlogged you can submit one and ask for copies of your internal data. You could do it now but unless you are having major issues the time on hold isn’t worth the information available.

DO NOT post diagnostic numbers here, the forum mods will have to delete due to Sonos security policy.


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