65K limit - any simple workaround?

In general I don’t see much value in preserving the identity of CD01, CD02 … in the index. I keep the CD’s in separate folders on the drive because it’s a little easier for maintenance, but I don’t care about this in the index. If one renumbers the tracks consecutively from the first CD in a set, it’s easier to play the box in order. (of course this breaks down if there are more than 99 tracks in the set.)

“However, it doesn’t respect the order of the CDs in a set - e.g. CD01, CD02 etc.”

when you rip, make sure you have each cd in a separate folder.

this way the method i laid out works easily.

also, you may have noticed that Sonos search is painful re albums that have guests on.

i.e. you search for an artist, find your album, and boom off you go, only to realise its missing tracks as it plays.

for electronica albums that feature a lot of guests this is a massive pain, meaning you have to then search for the album by title in order to play the whole album properly.

the solution  i posted up there bypasses all that.

an album is listed in a folder, and cares not re who/where/what.

you drill down to the album, press play … 

there are some quirks that you need to be aware of re unsupported characters in the names of tracks, but this is easy to fix (edit the name of the mp3, edit the name in the associated m3u file basically).

The box sets are of the major composers works, so are each quite large (e.g. 170 CDs Mozart, 157 for J S Bach etc) - they are usually 2-3,000 tracks.

I don’t use Sonos indices or lists - I always use the folder views so that I can navigate to what I want easily and I don’t get offered pages of unwanted info - especially where Sonos mixes up contemporary and classical music - it’s just a mess.

Yes, I do. Every CD is in it’s own folder. e.g. the hierarchy would be something like Mozart Complete Works/CD01 First pieces, CD02 Second pieces etc.

The editor that I am using generates the lists OK, but it seems to mix up the albums, so it may put CD101 before CD09. As most of my preferred works are usually during the first half of the CDs, the order is important. In addition, if you have 21 CDs of Baryton works, you don’t want them mixed in with everything else.

I can make the playlist work, but only by adding each directory individually - which would be rather time consuming. I’d like something that simply goes through each top level folder recursively - in order - and generates the playlist.

JOOI, Foobar 2000 seems to work fine.

Currently experimenting in moving a couple of large box sets out of the main Sonos library to see how it pans out.

Thanks for making me revisit this. I discarded the idea of external playlists fairly early on, but in my particular circumstances this works well.

I’ve shifted two ‘complete works’ box sets out to an external directory and produced playlists for them, and it seems to be working fine. Having deleted them from the main data set, I now have about 320 CDs worth of headroom :-)

glad it worked for you.

like you, my music can often cause a lot of problems for standard Sonos indexing (multitracked mixtapes with multiple guests etc), and i have found this m3u config makes life so much simpler,  hence why i have now much more in my extras/M3U directory.

i also separate off whole chunks of my digital archive according to record label which is great as when i drill down into the record label folder i am reminded of albums i would normally forget about …

I may have spoken too soon - it seems to lose the remaining tracks when it’s been paused for a while, although AFAIA the NAS is set to never spin down. More investigation required ;-)

weird.

that’s not something i have ever experienced.

there are times, a track wont play, and Sonos throws up an error about the track being unavailable and yet its listed. 

i have found that the problem is down to the filename and the associated listing in the M3U file - especially if there are non standard characters in the name of the track.

the solution is to change the name of the digital file, and then edit the M3U file so it connects to the renamed digital file.

as i said, there are a few quirks, but once you get things settled and used to the way it all hangs together, its a very easy workaround to the 65k limit.

m.

Yes, I think that you’re right - it seems as if Sonos indexes the files differently, as it finds and plays the same files perfectly - and the casting approach also has no problem. I’ll stick with those methods for now.