Albums have suddenly started to behave strangely.

Still broken but now in a different way…

Do my eyes deceive me? I added a new album to my library today and held my breath as I scanned for new content. I don’t know if I got lucky, but when I looked to see what albums had become duplicates, I couldn’t find any 😀.

Has anyone else noticed this?

I have 12 album corruptions after latest index.

I just added an album to my Music Library.  I put it in the same Genre folder that contains the problem album.   Then I did a Scan for new content using the same iPhone I always use for this function.  The album that had three albums with the same track in each album then showed correctly as one album with 15 tracks.

I looked at some of the other album and didn't find any duplicates or oddities.  I'll have to look further when I have more time.

ClausN:

You are probably right.  The indexing is done by the “Associated Product”.  I did take a Firmware update with the last app update.  As much press as this indexing mess has gotten over the last year or so you would think Sonos would advertise an indexing firmware fix in capital letters.

Finally found time to submit a detailed report via Sonos Chat today. Crossing fingers something good comes from it.

--Brian

Adding some test results in case they help anyone, or help Sonos narrow this down. I worked through this with the help of Claude (Anthropic's AI assistant), which wrote and ran the check scripts and helped me interpret the results. These are observations from one system, not proof, so treat them with some caution.

Setup: 2 × Play:1 on S2, software 17.2.7. About 7,700 tracks (MP3 and AAC) on a Synology NAS over SMB. Daily index update off, albums grouped by Album Artist.

How we measured it: a script compared every album in the Sonos index with the files in its folder on the NAS, after each index update. That showed which albums were short, duplicated or missing each time.

What I saw

• The tags don't seem to be the cause. As far as we could tell, broken albums have the same tags, tag structure and artwork as albums that work. Search found every "missing" track with the correct album and artist; only the album view looked wrong.
• It looked repeatable. On my system, the same library contents gave the same broken albums. A full rebuild of an unchanged library reproduced the same set.
• Unrelated changes seemed to move it.
  • I set Album Artist to "Various Artists" on 43 compilations. They merged correctly, but six other albums whose files I hadn't touched dropped to 1 track, and another vanished from the album list.
  • I then removed only the iTunes library XML, the file Sonos reads for imported playlists, and changed no music files. Four broken albums came back, two others broke, and seven disappeared from the album list.
  • When I put a playlist file back (a different, freshly exported one), I got the same broken set as before, album for album.
• Not every change moved it. Deleting one duplicate 11-track folder didn't change anything else.
• Renaming or re-saving an album usually fixed that album, but others broke. As others here have said, it's a moving target.

My guess, and it is only a guess, is that this supports @ClausN's point that it's in the indexer on the speakers rather than the app. The result seems to depend on the state of the whole index rather than on the affected albums' own files.

Things that helped me (probably separate from the bug)

• Duplicate copies of files elsewhere on the share. Sonos seemed to index only one copy and skip the other. I had 200+ stale copies left behind by a sync tool. Removing them took my skipped files from 228 to 1.
• Compilations with an empty Album Artist were listed once per track artist. Setting Album Artist to "Various Artists" merged them, though for me the change also shuffled the bug onto other albums.
• Folders view (Music Library → Folders) plays the broken albums normally.
• If you use iTunes/Apple Music playlists: Apple Music on my Mac doesn't seem to update the XML file automatically any more. I had to use File → Library → Export Library, then re-index.

I've sent all of this to Sonos support as well (case 09279091), and they've linked it to the existing indexing case.

I just wanted to say hello to all my fellow sufferers. I contacted customer support about 6months ago and went through all the it's not the meta data that's the issue chat and he just gave up after a while. It seems to have become worse recently too with more albums having an issue when I 'correct' current problems. For each mole whacked two appear. 

Some file systems will automatically create a backup folder and move the old copy of an updated file into the backup folder as you update the main library file. Typically, the Sonos indexer will process the backup folder first. In this case the recently updated file will be ignored as a duplicate and your edit is seemimgly ignored. Duplicate files in the main library share can also be an issue because the user has no control over file processing order of files in the share. Again, the first copy encountered will be included in the index. If you are working with another copy of the file that is encountered later in the processing sequence, your expected edit will be ignored.

It’s easy enough to disable creation of the automatic backup folder, but near duplicates in the main folder can result in frustrating issues. For the sake of discussion, assume the there are three copies of a file, A, B, and, C, that the indexer will interpret as duplicates and A is your focus. Again, you have no control over final processing order. If a given run of the indexer first discovers A, everything works as you expect, however, if a subsequent run first discovers B or C, your edits to A will be ignored. This is very confusing for the poor human.

After posting yesterday I thought why not give it another go. Spoke to customer support, got escalated to level 2 and went through all the usual checks. Left the call having the rescan in process with the promise of if it didn't work to respond to the email and it would be further looked into. As you all already know it didn't work (new albums with the problem instead) so I've replied to say just that. Let's see how the looking into it goes.