Sonos Controller - Duplicate Album Titles

Yes, you're quite right, that's exactly how it works.

Clarification:  I’m not having a ‘Various Artists’ problem.  Of the 13 album titles I currently have with duplicate album entries, only three of them are ‘Various Artists’ albums.

The one particular album I chose to make available for SONOS does happen to be a V/A album, but I chose it just because it was compact enough to fit in my available Dropbox space and might be sufficient for SONOS to generate the problem.

I think the problem probably centers on the combined memory requirement for album title, album artist, track title, contributing artist, etc. - not just the number of tracks.

I agree with your statement of the problem, although in my case sometimes an album only shows two times.

Thanks!

Just an update.  SONOS support acknowledged receipt of my album for testing:

Thank you for the update.  I am going to run some testing with this album and see if I can replicate the behavior on my own system.

Will post any feedback I receive.

FWIW...I received this reply from SONOS Support:

“I also saw three Paste Vault albums when I moved that folder onto my machine.  I was able to clear it by opening all the tracks in Mp3tag and removing all the "Comment" metadata fields.  Most of these tracks had a bunch of 1s and 0s for comments and this seemed to be causing an issue with the index.

To quickly remove the comments, open the album in Mp3tag, then CTRL + A, right click and choose Extended Tags.  From there, change each Comment from <keep> to <remove>.  Reindex Sonos and it should clear up the duplicates.

Let me know if this works on your system or if you get different results.”

My response:

“Thanks for checking and for the feedback.  I will do as you suggest.

But, while this may clear up this one instance, it still confirms to me that there is some kind of software memory management issue in the indexing process.  Why was your process corrupted by the mere presence of comments in the metadata?  Why should I, your customer, be required to do things like this, just to make your software work correctly?

My guess is that, even after making this change, I will still see duplicates.  In fact, I recently did a test where I removed that album completely from my library, re-indexed, and still had multiple occurrences of false duplicates in the Albums list.

Can you still explore that?  Why could your software not handle the comments?

Please advise.

PS I hope you all have supported the mp3tag developer, as I have!”

So I did remove the comments from the metadata for that one album and reindexed.  That album no longer shows as a duplicate.

And, as expected, I still have other bogus duplicates. I have gone from 13 dupes down to 10. But some of the 10 are new to the list, while others of the original 13 are no longer there.

I’ll summarize these results and send back to SONOS.

Roger,

As you quite rightly say, why should the customers cover up for errors in the Sonos software that have come about due to Sonos not checking things thoroughly before instigating changes.

Well written software should be able to deal with things out of the ordinary. Surely the software should only read the necessary tags & ignore the rest. 

It is something that many software vendors do nowadays. Release it and hope for the best.

Let's keep our fingers crossed that Sonos can finally get to the bottom of this. If they do, they should also clearly acknowledge the help that you are giving.

 If I don’t tag properly all the control point apps I’ve ever used will tell me so.

👍🏻 Although I don’t think this is a case of improper tagging - I think it’s their software not dealing correctly with valid tagging.

Anyway, the only reason I came back to post again right now is that, as I was scrolling my Albums list, I’m also listening to a bunch of queued tracks (from my ‘Vinyl’ folder), which I have done many times.

And (in the Windows controller) my queue list suddenly went blank:

Great software. But I don’t plan to pursue this, as it might not be easily re-created.  Just FYI...likely another memory management issue.

Just following up, for confirmation:  I shut down and restarted the controller.  Queue shows correctly now:

It’s all tracks I’ve copied from vinyl, queued randomly - which I often do.  Good memories… and RIP Country Joe McDonald... ;)

Long post - sorry.

First, because SONOS cleared up a problem indexing one of my albums by removing the comments from the tags on those tracks, I used mp3tag to remove ALL track comments from my library.

Second, mp3tag had also identified some kind of ‘error’ in the tags on seven of my albums (all downloaded from external sources), so I moved those albums into a holding folder outside my library, leaving me with a library with no tag comments and no tag errors.

Reindexed - still have 12 duplicate albums in the Albums list.

So I temporarily reduced my music library to just my Vinyl folder and reindexed (the library normally consists of four different music folders).  Now just two duplicate albums.

Then I moved about half of the Vinyl folder into another folder and re-indexed just that one half.  No duplicates.

Then I renamed the two halves so that the second half would be indexed.  Two duplicates.

Finally I took the half with the duplicates and split that in half.  Reindexed the first half. No duplicates.  Reindexed the second half. No duplicates.

So the two halves combined yielded two duplicates, but each half individually yielded none.

mp3tag showed me that I have 10 different tag formats in my complete library, so I thought maybe the problem might have been with a particular tag format not being parsed properly. But, in my vinyl folder, there is only one format (thanks to the software I used to copy the vinyl albums), so apparently it wasn’t that.

Seems to be volume/memory related - especially since the long comments in the tags on just that one album resulted in duplicates. I was hoping to whittle things down to a small enough clean but still problematic set that I could pass on to SONOS, but each half of Vinyl is 20GB with about 3,500 titles.

I may try a similar approach with my other folders and see if I can get something smaller...but not hopeful.

Working my way through this updated thread, sorry I’ve been MIA. I’m also literately writing down my view of this problem to be read to Sonos Support Team when I give them a call tomorrow or Friday.

--Brian

This, I’m about 99% sure it’s not gonna do anything.

--Brian

Can confirm that it’s not a “Comments” tag issue, latest software:

--Brian

Long post - sorry.

First, because SONOS cleared up a problem indexing one of my albums by removing the comments from the tags on those tracks, I used mp3tag to remove ALL track comments from my library.

Second, mp3tag had also identified some kind of ‘error’ in the tags on seven of my albums (all downloaded from external sources), so I moved those albums into a holding folder outside my library, leaving me with a library with no tag comments and no tag errors.

Reindexed - still have 12 duplicate albums in the Albums list.

So I temporarily reduced my music library to just my Vinyl folder and reindexed (the library normally consists of four different music folders).  Now just two duplicate albums.

Then I moved about half of the Vinyl folder into another folder and re-indexed just that one half.  No duplicates.

Then I renamed the two halves so that the second half would be indexed.  Two duplicates.

Finally I took the half with the duplicates and split that in half.  Reindexed the first half. No duplicates.  Reindexed the second half. No duplicates.

So the two halves combined yielded two duplicates, but each half individually yielded none.

mp3tag showed me that I have 10 different tag formats in my complete library, so I thought maybe the problem might have been with a particular tag format not being parsed properly. But, in my vinyl folder, there is only one format (thanks to the software I used to copy the vinyl albums), so apparently it wasn’t that.

Seems to be volume/memory related - especially since the long comments in the tags on just that one album resulted in duplicates. I was hoping to whittle things down to a small enough clean but still problematic set that I could pass on to SONOS, but each half of Vinyl is 20GB with about 3,500 titles.

I may try a similar approach with my other folders and see if I can get something smaller...but not hopeful.

Can confirm that it’s not a “Comments” tag issue, latest software:

--Brian

 

Except that they apparently contribute to the overall memory usage issue…???

Can confirm that it’s not a “Comments” tag issue, latest software:

--Brian

 

Its a long time since I tagged my collection, but if its a compilation/various artists, should the ‘Album Artist’ be ‘Various Artists’, the ‘Artist’ be the actual artist name, and compilations be ticked in the above example, the tags look wrong to me.

 I guess  might have some duplicates, but I have not found one yet.  Looking through my entire library is something that would take too much time.

 One thing I do have is consistent tagging.  All my tags are exactly the same.  All are done with DbPoweramp.  Any extra tag information that is part of download purchases is removed.  Only the tag categories that can be accessed from within control point apps are the ones I fill.

 For compilations my tagging has always been Artist=actual performer(s) and Album Artist=Various.

 When I did have duplicate compilation albums a while back Sonos fixed that issue.  
 
 I’m not a big fan of indexing systems like BlueSound & Sonos, but Sonos does Atmos so here I am.

Can confirm that it’s not a “Comments” tag issue, latest software:

--Brian

 

Its a long time since I tagged my collection, but if its a compilation/various artists, should the ‘Album Artist’ be ‘Various Artists’, the ‘Artist’ be the actual artist name, and compilations be ticked in the above example, the tags look wrong to me.

No. The Album Artist tag super seeds the Artist tag. So it looks like this: Artists are tagged where appropriate. It’s worked this way for decades. Either way, the “Compilation” tag is needed to work as such. I’m not using that. Apple Music, Plex, these Apps show things fine. This is a Sonos issue.

--Brian

If I was tagging this album, I would follow best practice for tagging compilation/soundtrack albums, eg:

https://forum.dbpoweramp.com/forum/dbpoweramp/cd-ripper/44693-managing-soundtracks-and-compilations-of-various-artists

 For soundtrack albums my Genre is “Soundtrack”.  If the soundtrack is composed by let’s say John Williams he becomes both the Artist & Album Artist.  The movie title is obviously the Album tag.

 If the soundtrack album is made up of various pop or rock tracks I treat it like a compilation album.  The Genre is still “Soundtrack”.  I usually don’t bother with those types of soundtracks.

I have a new one, which also seems to point to memory corruption, or possibly a communication with NAS problem. (Has that been ruled out?)

I just re-scanned the library and ended up with (in addition to triple albums) an artist listed 27 times in a row. Each having the same 39 (out of 47) albums by that artist. When that happened, I removed the library altogether. Scanned, so there was nothing. Then added the library back and re-scanned. The result was the same triple albums and also the same artist repeated 27 times. Scanning twice yielded the same results.

I added another new album, re-scanned and now it’s back to just the triple album problem.

That’s nice and might work for some people. But this is the way I have found works best for me. Every other App is fine with is, Sonos is not special. Also worth noting that I’ve have a few “Various Artists” albums too that also have had this duplicate issue. Currently, it seems I have only one at this time:

The “Complication” toggle is a trap and in my experience, causes more problems than its worth. Album Artist fixes that.

--Brian

I realize I have a very large music library. And I half expected to run into problems eventually. But my S1 system doesn’t have a problem and it’s using the exact same library. Adding all songs to an empty queue in S1 says 50,502 songs. In S2 it says 50,470. Don’t know why the difference.

I’ve tried with both macOS and the iOS App, that would mean that the “leak” would be present on both Apps, which might be weird?

I think the problem is in the firmware. The library is scanned and built on a sonos device and then sent to all the rest of the devices. The apps don’t build the library.

 ​@CronoCX: 

 I’m confused by the three “R3X’s Playlist #1…#2…#3”.  That would be 3 different albums.