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Sonos error indexing my music library

  • 20 June 2023
  • 5 replies
  • 402 views

Hello everyone,

A few months ago Sonos put out an update (I have no idea which one, but I’m sure they do!) which has effectively stopped my personal music library from indexing.

I can run the “Update Music Library” as many times as you wish, and I systematically receive the same error message:

The music is stored on a NAS - which has no issues.

The network is working perfectly well.

This is a known issue with Sonos - I have sent logs and talked to their Service Centre.

I simply can’t understand why this issue is not being dealt with! They have known about it for months, but no answers?

Getting seriously worried that their teams are focusing only on streaming, and abandoning the thousands of clients like myself with libraries  to which we hold dear, and want to be able to use as one of our sources of listening to music!

Hope someone out there has some answers - because Sonos certainly doesn’t!!

Gerard

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5 replies

buzz

Something to try:

Rather than a single share, such as \\mydrive\music, define multiple smaller shares, such as \\mydrive\music\jazz, \\mydrive\music\classical, \\mydrive\music\seasonal, etc. Up to 16 shares are supported. In the SONOS controller the only difference for the user will be in the Folders view of the library.

My thought is that the single large share ties up too much memory, requires longer execution times, and the ‘fail’ message is in response to a timeout. Experiences seem to vary. Some users claim that they ran into trouble at a few thousand tracks, one user claimed 800 tracks. I suspect that the number and size of Sonos Playlists is in the mix too. And, the size of the Metadata (Artist, Track name, Composer, etc.) effects the memory requirement and execution time. Just to be perverse,  I added 10000 specialized tracks to my library. These tracks have short Metadata and the Queue was empty while I ran the Library Indexer. I then built a Queue of 60000 of these tracks and saved it as a Sonos Playlist. This was in addition to a few other Playlists that already existed. There were no issues.

O

Yes, thanks for that. I’ve seen a few posts saying something similar, some successful some less-so…

Another proposition from Sonos Support was to connect my NAS directly to my PC - defeats the object of a NAS, so not a solution either.

In reality, I’m posting in the vague hope that somewhere in Sonos someone is reading these posts, which express a frustration with a situation which only really requires a couple of developers to sit down and work it out!

The fact that Sonos was an excellent way to link up my, and other people’s large (and proudly acquired and maintained), music libraries to a sound system - surely they realise that can’t just sit this out and hope it goes away??

Anyway, thanks for the advice!

S
Badge

       So your question is only about Indexing can you play any music from your NAS?   I too have a Synology DS918+ NAS with thousands of MP3’s and just recently discovered I can’t play music from it any more via Sonos I get permission Denied.  The Albums/Song titles are all viewable in the app under Music Library but none of them are playable.  IF I try to re-index the library I get the same error that the NAS path is no longer available yet the App can see everything in it.     A few years ago Synology put out an OS update that no longer supported SMB1 for security reasons and Sonos S1 systems use SMB1 so I lost access.   Once I understood what the error was I was able to enable SMB1 support on the NAS and boom I got access to my files again.   Now there are no errors and I too worry Sonos released an update to force all us legacy users to upgrade to S2. 

       In the process of troubleshooting this I created a Sonos user/password on the NAS and gave that account access to the Music folder on the NAS vs using my personal account which had full access to the NAS.   I went into the app and added the NAS as the \\hostname\music and then tried \\ip addr\music using the Sonos credentials and I see each Sonos device connects to the music folder so the connection is there but the app still reports permission denied when I try to play any songs.   Nothing changed on the NAS AFAIK but Sonos updates come down so who knows what the root cause is.

Music folder on NAS mapped both ways:

Attempt to play a Rush song flashes the hostname path first then the ip path:

Attempt to play U2 song just shows the hostname path:

NAS Logs shows the connections from each Sonos device are successful AND the initial index succeeds otherwise my complete Music Library wouldn’t appear in the App:

 

   I’ll try adding smaller libraries but this has worked for 15+ years until recently so I don’t see how memory constraints of the older devices could be the issue unless Sonos changed the app to consume more memory.  I have not bought a CD in years so I’m not adding anything to my music library.  IF anything streaming takes care of all my modern music requests it’s this legacy stuff from the 70’s and 80’s that I like to go back to my favorite albums from time to time…..

     I logged into my Sonos account to open a support ticket on this topic after Googling and not finding anything.  Before hitting SEND here I saw other community posts that look similar and saw some interesting statements about indexing failing at 65K files.  I just check my music library has 839 albums/folders with 8928 files/MP3’s so I’m way below the 65K limit.   I also saw a reco to let Plex handle the indexing and configure Sonos to connect to Plex?  IDK how but I’m looking into that idea as I have/love Plex for my MP4’s.

 

 

Scott D
J

If I read this correctly, you are still on Sonos S1?  Is SMB1 enabled on the NAS?  

U

I now have this problem after a few years of a server working fine. The only change was a system reboot and app update. Sonos support said they were aware of the problem but had no realistic solution. 

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