Skip to main content
mvoorhees7670
Contributor I
April 4, 2018
Answered

Playlist size limitations

  • April 4, 2018
  • 5 replies
  • 3719 views
I have 500GB of music and use iTunes to manage the files. Free iTunes. My $2000 worthy of Sonos gear can’t recognize my larger playlist. There doesn’t seem to be a definitive answer as to how many songs Sonos can recognize in a playlist. It would be helpful if it didn’t have a limit but if it does, tell us clearly what that is so we can manage it.
This topic has been closed for further comments. You can use the search bar to find a similar topic, or create a new one by clicking Create Topic at the top of the page.
Best answer by Ken_Griffiths
Sonos limits the amount of characters allotted for each field of the metadata. This is due to memory allocations for the 65,000 track limit.

Field name Max Characters
Artists
76
Album
92
Track
100
Genre
22
File name
100

5 replies

Airgetlam
Airgetlam
April 4, 2018
Its been discussed at length in these forums, in many, many threads.

The difficulty in getting a clear answer is that it actually depends on all of the various tags that you have on your music. It isn't just the number of songs, it's all of the data you have associated with that.

With such a large amount of music, you may want to look at Plex as a service to play all of your music in your Sonos system.
Bruce
Ken_Griffiths
Ken_GriffithsAnswer
April 4, 2018
Sonos limits the amount of characters allotted for each field of the metadata. This is due to memory allocations for the 65,000 track limit.

Field name Max Characters
Artists
76
Album
92
Track
100
Genre
22
File name
100
    Stanley_4
    Stanley_4
    Grand Maestro
    April 5, 2018
    Looking at that list makes me think it might be worthwhile for folks hitting the limits to make a second copy of their music library and do some severe trimming of some of the fields in the copy for Sonos use.
    jgatie
    jgatie
    April 5, 2018
    As for playlists, I believe there is a 14,000 total track limit for iTunes playlists. You can get around this limit by exporting your iTunes playlists to .m3u files, which have no track limit because they are loaded when played.
    jr94063
    Lyricist II
    May 26, 2018
    When I got my first sonos many years ago, I did not have an issue with the size of my playlists. Now there are issues and the playlists won't fully queue or save. I have a total of 19k songs and trying to add one M3U playlist from my NAW of around 8k songs. Right now it's the only playlist on my sonos and it either will not load/save or will get truncated at around 2500 tracks. If I try to import playlists under 2k songs, I don't have a problem.
    Terms & ConditionsAccessibility statement