Sonos Controller - Duplicate Album Titles

Hey ​@RogerWF, welcome back!

I am sorry to hear you are still experiencing issues with your Music Library on Sonos.

I've had a look through your case, and while I would want to leave the technical troubleshooting to my colleagues from tech support, who should reply to your email soon, I might have some suggestions (hopefully I'm not rehashing things).

I can see multiple music shares added to your Sonos system, are those still relevant? If not, I would recommend removing the music shares that are no longer relevant and then re-index.

Feel free to reply here with any updates from your case, thank you for sharing and I hope this helps.

Hi, Thanks for the reply.  Sorry but I don’t know what you mean by ‘multiple music shares’.  Please clarify for this geezer, including how to remove, in case it is not obvious.  FWIW:  my music is stored on a Synology NAS.  Thanks again, Roger

Hi Roger, take a look here: Albums have suddenly started to behave strangely for an ongoing discussion of this problem.

Multiple music shares, that would be more than the single line like I have here under Your Folders.

Ah - thanks. Makes sense. Yes, I have my music split into a few subfolders for different reasons. For example, I have ‘Christmas’ music in a subfolder that I add or remove from Sonos, depending on the season. It’s been fine all along, and some time ago I had an online session with a Sonos tech, who expressed no concerns about that. I think I’ll leave it alone unless they bring it up. Thanks again.

Thanks. This looks interesting. Busy now but will take a look later. I did a search for ‘duplicates’ before I posted, just to see if there were any updates along those lines (since that was my original issue), but didn’t see this. Thanks again.

It shouldn't hurt to remove all but one folder and reindex to see if the problem changes.

It is easy to generate overlapping shares with SMB and that is the quick way to check for it.

Given our lack of access to internal device logs and status we have to work with what we are allowed to see.

Hi,

I started that thread, I should have perhaps chosen a better name for it. However I did contact Sonos support on Tuesday October the 14th. It apparently has been escalated to level two, whatever that actually means. I was told someone would be in touch, but so far nothing. I do urge people experiencing this to contact support, the more that do, hopefully,  might mean someone will take this seriously.

There are some suggestions that a recent update to the app might have fixed this, but it hasn't, I’ve tried as have others. If you need to play an album that is affected you need to access it via Music Library - Folders, once you find the album in the folder all the tracks are listed. It's not ideal, but better than nothing.

Check out ​@Anthony_6 ‘s thread. All it takes is to add an album or rename a folder and re-scan and the problem albums are now fine and a different set of albums display this problem.

Thanks for the pointer! Some of it describes my situation perfectly (e.g. one album showing up as three in the Albums list, with only one track in one of the three, while the album displays correctly in the Folders list).  Some of it is Greek to me, but I’ll just say that as a dumb user I shouldn’t have to take any extreme measures to make things work LIKE THEY USED TO! :)

I also identified a few other albums that now have multiple entries that previously did not.  I’m going to add a new album, re-index, and see how things change.

I will add that Sonos asked me for a couple of tracks from an album involved in my latest problem scenario. I provided the entire album.  Have not heard anything since then but will update if/when I do.

Roger

No one is a “dumb” user. To use any system like this shouldn’t need a masters degree. The simple fact is that long term users of Sonos have lost trust due to Mr Spence and his “courageous” app. Thankfully he’s gone, but we have to live with the consequences. I feel sorry for the staff at Sonos that still have to put up with the after effects. The new app hasn’t been too bad recently but now we have this new problem. I have been seriously considering changing to the S1 version of the app. Like you, all I want to do is listen to music, not have to devise ways around a problem. I can’t help thinking that those of us that still have our own music libraries are seen as a bit of a nuisance by Sonos. Mr Spence hinted at that when he gave us S2 “courageous” and initially you couldn’t even access your local library.

The truth is that most new users of Sonos are probably not going to notice this new issue as many people now stream their music from an outside source. I have for a long time used Sonos to listen to the radio through BBC Sounds and very good it is at doing that.

The upshot of this is that I wonder how much effort Sonos are going to put into fixing this issue. They told me they would keep me updated but the silence has been deafening. Clearly something has been changed that is causing this problem. This is why I no longer recommend Sonos to anyone.

Like you, if the silence is broken by Sonos I will post it on here, in the mean time let’s get back to enjoying our music. 😀

Thanks for the reply. As I indicated, I did add a new album and re-index. Some old problems persisted. Other previous problems are no longer problems, but albums that were listed correctly before are now messed up. And all this is within the ‘Albums’ list, while the ‘problem’ albums look fine via the ‘Folders’ list.

This confirms that it is not a metadata issue - it’s a software issue. My confidence in Sonos is now very low.

My situation is that I have over time purchased five different pieces of Sonos hardware. I have also invested a lot of time to digitize over 500 LPs - over 6000 tracks - that I’d accumulated over the years. An old favorite is ‘Dr. Root’s Garden’ by Chrysalis. Let me know if you find that on Spotify or Amazon.

I also support buying CDs from small performers that pass through town. You might find ‘John Stone’ on streaming services, but not the one that’s now messed up in the albums list (below).

Anyway I would not invest another penny in Sonos. To me this is indicative of the overall quality of their products. I’m sure they don’t care about this ‘geezer’, but that’s where I stand - until I see some good faith improvement.

I did receive a follow-up email asking me to submit a diagnostic, which I did. Don’t know if it matters, but I did it while playing one of the tracks from the above John Stone album. Will post whatever I hear.

Received another email from Sonos support:

“What happens if you move your entire Music folder to a new folder and then move it back again?  Does that clear up the duplicates?  If moving files resolves the issue then we should be able to just move all the files instead of just some of them.  

“Let me know your thoughts on this proposed test.”

So here’s what I did:

1. Used the SONOS client to ‘remove’ the music library folders, and then re-indexed. ‘Music Library’ is no longer present as a service. Then re-added one of my music folders and re-indexed again. Duplicate albums were again present in the album list. (Note: this may also address the concern someone raised about the fact that I had multiple ‘music shares’ in my music library.
2. Used the system folder tools on my server to create a new folder called ‘music_new’. Copied one folder from ‘music’ to ‘music_new’ and verified its content. Renamed ‘music’ to ‘music_old’, then ‘music_new’ to ‘music’. Added the new ‘music’, with its one sub-folder, back to Sonos and re-indexed. Duplicate albums were again present. (This also addresses the multiple ‘music shares’ concern.)
3. So I removed this new folder from Sonos, renamed ‘music_old’ back to ‘music’, and re-added/re-indexed my existing folders, setting everything back to the way it was. Of course the duplicates showed up again.

Sent an email back to support informing them of these results. More if/when I hear anything else.

Any other thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated.  Thanks!

I’ve done similar things. Not one of them fixed the problem.

I've now lost faith in Sonos, it’s simply one mess up after another.

You should be grateful that Sonos support are emailing you. They promised to keep in touch with me, but haven’t. Anyway, I’ll keep an eye on this forum.

Thanks for passing this on.

Had one more thought: could the issue be related to the fact that my music is in subfolders inside a ‘music’ folder?

So, using the Sonos controller app, I ‘removed’ my subfolders from the ‘music library’.

Then, on my server, I copied one of my subfolders up to the root level and renamed it ‘music_new’.

Finally, with the controller app, I added that folder to the music library and reindexed.

Same problem. So it seems that the ‘subfolders’ are not the issue.

Setting everything back to the way it was - again.

Will not do anything else until I hear back from Sonos support.