bit worried that this has been an issue for a number of months, the post below looks to be 9 months old

can’t understand why more people aren’t complaining about this, is local (large) music library access a thing of the past? I thought that was really one of the big selling points for Sonos (at least in the beginning), perhaps now they’re more focused on streaming and soundbars.

I’ll admit that I don’t run S1 anymore….but I’ve had zero issues with S2 and my WD MyCloud, using SMB 3

Create the problem and send in a diagnostic, then contact Sonos to have it looked at.

Sonos have admitted via email (after a lengthy remote session where they took control of my windows PC) that there is “an issue” but there is no “committed date” for a fix on their side. They have a workaround of limiting the upper SMB version to 1 which is pretty poor. An alternate way I’ve figured out to mitigate this is to limit the amount of changes in the library between index scans. I don’t know what the upper limit is but I’ve completed a lengthy experiment this evening where I rebuilt my library from scratch adding 20-30 albums at a time. The S2 has managed to index the lot without erroring. I’ll monitor it for a period and see how it behaves. My concern is if you ever see the dreaded “share unreachable” error it seems the only way to recover is to delete the library and start again from scratch adding it back in small chunks. Doing a 300GB library takes an entire evening.

Try a different approach. Break your library into multiple shares. For example:

\\drive\music\classical
\\drive\music\jazz
\\drive\music\pop

etc.

You can use up to 16 shares.

My thought is that a large share (many tracks) will use too much memory while building the index. Smaller shares (fewer tracks) require less memory during the index build. Using shorter file names will help too. Some rippers throw a lot of junk into the file names. While not ideal for the human, SONOS would be happy with file names 00001.flac --> 65000.flac all in a single folder. I store each CD in its own folder and include the track number in the file name. For example: TRK01.flac. File size does not matter.

Thanks for your input @buzz unfortunately restructuring my library as you suggest isn’t an option for me (and shouldn’t be necessary). Also using meta data (ie Genre as you suggest) as a directory structure will likely lead me to confusion. A lot of tracks in my library have more than one genre tag. I suppose alphabetical folders might have been an option but as I say shouldn’t be necessary.

I received a Sonos update this morning, I think it was both a controller and firmware update. After completing that update I had another shot at adding back in my 300Gb library in one go. This time it worked. No idea if the recent update sorted it or whether it was something else. Will update this thread in future if it goes south again.

My folder structure does not interact with the metadata, but it will impact Folders view of the library.

actually it’s still broken, yesterday was a one-off working scenario, the dreaded “folder no longer available” error is back….very disappointing

So after a few days of monitoring this it seems that things are perhaps a little better than they were pre the latest Sono update (earlier in April) but things are still far from ideal.

After rebuilding my library for the second time Sonos was able to finally index the whole 22K tracks (~300GB) however large playlists still give it problems. If I load up an (imported) playlist of say 500 tracks or more it will throw the “can’t find track/file” error for the first few tracks until it settles down.

I’m paranoid about adding any more CD rips to the library since it would appear that once you get the “NAS isn’t there” error the only way to fix it (and it’s not really a fix) is to rebuild the full library one slow chunk at a time.

After a recent S2 Sonos update (about a week ago) I thought that this issue had been addressed since I was no longer seeing the “NAS not available error” during a Music Library update. What seems to be happening now is although the error doesn’t get thrown a number of albums simply don’t get added to the library. If you browse the Music Library using “folder view” Sonos simply omits the folders/albums it’s not managed to index (I have about 1000 folders in the main music share, one folder per CD/album).

As ever S1 continues to work without flaws on the same network using the same NAS share for Music Library. Very disappointing.

Alas the "//{nas path}/Folder/" is no longer available error has returned...which means the entire Music Library is now lost AGAIN. C’mon SONOS please sort this out. @Corry P  in case you can help with this one. Please note SONOS support have admitted this is an issue but there’s no commitment to fix it as far as I can tell.

Hi @groove_regulator 

I’m afraid there’s nothing I can add to this.

thanks all the same @Corry P , I’m really struggling to understand why Sonos aren’t prioritising a fix for this, a significant ratio of long term investors/users in Sonos would have purchased the platform specifically because of its ability to work with music shares on a NAS drive, it feels like we’re being abandoned.

@Corry P  are you able to remove the “answered” status of this post please? There’s an implication with the “green tick” that it’s resolved which of course it’s not.

Hi @groove_regulator 

You make it sound like all NAS solutions are affected - they are not. I connect my S2 system to a Raspberry Pi running a SMB1/2/3 Samba server completely without issue, and there are users on this very thread reporting no problems with their NAS setups. As far as I am aware, this issue only manifests with certain setups, largely those involving self-contained, third-party NAS devices.

I can’t really comment on the priorities of our developers, but we are aware of how many users are affected by certain issues and adjust our responses accordingly.

Yes, and I will do so, but please be aware that our green tick is in no way supposed to indicate a solution, only a “Best Answer”, i.e. the best advice to follow out of that given so far. In addition, once this thread has seen no activity for 3 days, we are required to find and mark the Best Answer once again - which may very well be the exact same post as is marked now.

I hope this helps.

Edit: Although I can convert this thread into a conversation thread rather than a question thread.

Today I set up a Synology 923+ (migrating from a 10+ year older version).  I had similar problems to groove_regulator with Synology’s default SMB setup and the “folder is no longer available” issue during multiple scan attempts.  But, I found when I changed it to support only SMB1 or SMB2 (and NOT SMB3), my large-ish folder (56G) was successfully scanned.

I did have to readjust Synology’s TimeMachine Bonjour broadcast to use AFP (and not SMB Bonjour broadcast, which requires SMB3), but so far things seem to work OK - I can play music with Sonos S2, and also the Music app on our iMac (off of the shared NAS), and TimeMachine seems to be backing up OK.

Hoping it continues to work...fingers crossed!

I hope this can help someone… :-) 

I can add QNAP to the list of NAS that has the exact same issue (~230GB library). Running across a 40g Thunderbolt interface to a Mac Mini OSX 13.3.1. Since the last patch, it’s at least gone from “path is no longer available” to “updating music library” and then after a few minutes “Path is no longer available”, but I haven’t successfully been able to complete indexing without getting disconnected after 30 or so attempts.

It’s definitely the folder size, as I’ve tried adding a single album folder from the same NAS successfully, but similarly to OP, I’m unwilling to break up my music collection and reorganize years of collected music just to accommodate faulty software.

Sadly this morning my wife asked me why I never play music on Sonos and I blast music to the kitchen from my living room stereo instead. I told her because I’m unable to load any of our music onto the Sonos since updating to S2. I really hope Sonos fixes this as we have multiple bricks sitting in our home right now that don’t ever play music. Amazing hardware, but please fix the software so we can actually use the hardware.

Is there a way to roll back to an older version that works? I’m willing to trade fancy features for the ability to play music on my speakers.

+1 from me.

I am using a venerable Western Digital My Book Live that is suffering the same fate. It’s old (latest firmware from 2015), so given its age I will replace it with a modern NAS when funds allow. But I had been using it for years with my Sonos system with no problems, whereas now I cannot properly index my music library.

Following advice elsewhere, I have added subfolders by artist to break up my collection. Starting over, I was able to index the ABC folder, then the DEF folder, but quickly received an error when trying to index GHI. And now if I try to update the index, it fails quickly on ABC. Anything that does get indexed can be played with no issues, which for me at present is artists from A to I.

Fingers crossed for a fix soon

Hi. I don’t suppose the fix for this was in 15.5 that released this week? The release notes just say bug fixes.

Quick update on the approach I outlined in my previous post.  Things have been working smoothly for me so far for the past month+ with the approach I outlined above - adjusting my NAS to only support SMB1 or SMB2, but not SMB3.

I’d sure love to be able to use SMB3 though...hoping this issue gets resolved soon.  AFP has been deprecated since Big Sur and it’s sort of “half-working” in Ventura, so I’d prefer to not to have to rely on it - Apple can decide to just completely remove it at any point.

Fingers crossed!

This still doesn’t work….

Have same issue with QNAP TS-453Be NAS running QTS 5. 54K track local music library.  Tried downgrading SMB but to no avail.  However I do use Plex and Plex can be accessed as a Streaming Service (just like Spotify) from Sonos.  So its effectively Sonos → Plex → NAS Music Library.  

In the event that it helps, I was getting the same error when using the iOS app to add my new library location.

"//{nas path}/Folder/" is no longer available

...but was able to add it without issue using the Windows Sonos desktop app.

I finally got the indexing to work after changing the file share settings on my Buffalo NAS drive to SMB1.  Like others, with SMB2 enabled, the indexing would fail after 10 seconds or so with the share “no longer available” error message. 

Thanks to this thread for pointing out a work-around.

Hi,

The same problem occurs here. The system with multiple S1 components has been working smoothly for years with the QNAP NAS, which contains approximately 5,000 songs.
Bought an additional Roam SL a few months ago and after installation it gives the same error "//{nas path}/Folder/" is no longer available".
In the NAS log I see that 130 tracks are successfully requested by Sonos, but then it stops.
I started creating a smaller library. That worked once, but the next time - after a reset of the Roam - it does not and I get the error again "//{nas path}/Folder/" is no longer available".
I suspect my NAS only accepts SMB levels 1 and 2.

It is hard to understand that this problem has been known for 9 months and that there is still no solution.