Sonos no longer recognizing folder.jpg for cover art?

Works find on the few folders  have with just folder.jpg

I use MP3Tag to update all my Album art to decent quality images, mainly obtained from Albumartexchange.  It’s take some time to refresh the lot, a year or two!

I have had times when the artwork went awol, normally after a system update.  Easily solved in my case by unplugging all my sonos kit, restarting my router and then after 10mins plugging back in all my Sonos kit.

I just put some songs from my music library up to be played and I’m seeing no album art too. All my covers are saved as folder.jpg and have been working fine up to now.

Tried restarting the controller and running a fresh library index with no change.

Here are some artwork considerations.

I unplugged all players. (But not the router, that makes no sense). I plugged them in again. I updated the music index. No change. Still no cover art for albums where there is a single folder.jpg in the folder (as stated in the article buzz linked to).

So it seems like Sonos broke something. These are my zones:

A: 2 Play3 + 1 Sub (Gen one). One of the Play3 is connected with network cable to the router.

B: Port.

C: Two Sonos Five

D: Two Sonos One SL

E: Two Play1.

One issue I have noticed is that the App is very impatient. If the artwork is not returned promptly, the controller gives up. I can’t define “prompt” and I don’t know if the delay is caused by bumbling inside the App, the device running the App, or out on the network. WiFi interference could be a contributor, but this leaves tracks in a diagnostic.

Router reboot is valid.  If the router has got is IP addressing in a mess then it could be slow in giving info to the Sonos products and as i found when using extenders the past, Sonos plays music but gives up on providing the artwork.  Embeded artwork seems to be a simpler task to display, I presume as it is delivered as part of the playing file.  The folder.jpg needs to be matched with the file playing and it seems if the network is poor Sonos gives up on this if it exceed a certain response time.  These are my assumptions when I had the same issues. I was using powerplugs at the time, now I have Ethernet connectivity it rarely becomes an issue.

I have given up on managing playlists by the Sonos App, not only because of the Album artwork flaws but also because of the poor playlist management features. Best alternative I found so far was to manage all tracks in the Apple Music App and use the AirPlay2 streaming. Artwork stored in the track metadata are nicely displayed by the Sonos App.

OK, so now I see cover art in the queue on my desktop controller for most of the tracks - but not all. Now playing is empty. The queue is one single imported playlist. (I basically only use imported playlists, as I have a program that makes a random selection of album every day.) There is a folder.jpg in the folder for the playlist; no embedded cover art.

I also had an imported playlist open in the browser - no cover art.

Note that Sonos had been idle for the last six hours or so.

I also noticed that on the embedded ones, the art is kind of slow to turn up, like 15-20 seconds after the upgrade. It used be faster.

I’d still recommend a router re-boot.  If the router has invalid or duplicate ip addresses stored it will slow down your lan and delivery of info to Sonos units.  I found that after a Sonos update especially, as each speaker is restarted as part of the update and the router may no have refreshed the Ip addresses properly.

OK, I give in. I downloaded and installed new firmware for the routers. Cover art for folder.jpg appeared instantly in the Sonos player. Interesting enough, it still takes some time for the cover art to appear with the album that has the cover art embedded.

Thanks for being persistent in leading me in the right direction!