Music Library Out of Sync

Many possibilities. What kind of computer would help folks give better answers. Also how you are sharing the music.

Did you leave music in a recycle bin that is shared with Sonos?

Do you have any characters that Sonos doesn’t care for in your directories / files?

You’ll get much better answers if you give us more information.

Hi Stanley,

Thank you for your response. To answer your questions:

1. I’m running Windows 10 Pro on a high-end PC.
2. My music is stored in a folder with subfolders for each album. The subfolders are listed by artist, with subfolders for each album. For example,

D:\Music\My Music Library\Celine Dion\Let’s Talk About Love.

3. I share my Music Library using the Sonos App > Manage > Adding the path to my Library:

My Music Library, Path: D:\Music\My Music Library

4. There are albums and songs in my Recycle Bin stemming from organizing my folders and albums.
5. I don’t use any special characters other than the “&” sign, as in “Simon & Garfunkel.”

I think I’ve covered everything you asked for. If not, fire away! And most importantly, thanks for your offer to help.

Steve

The recycle bin may be your issue, if the reindex is seeing things there it will try to add them too.

You do have the Sonos App loaded on the Windows system? I don’t use it but I understand it is preferred to using an SMB file share. This process should be running in the background: SonosLibraryServer.exe

https://support.sonos.com/en-us/downloads

If nothing else try again and then submit a diagnostic, then call Sonos support to have them look at the, hidden from us users, internal data.

Stanley,

I emptied my Recycle Bin and Removed and Added My Music Library so that my Sonos Desktop is looking at the most recent music folders. Unfortunately, I still have a slew of “Unknown Artists.”

I am running the most current Sonos S2 desktop application. 

My next approach is to delete My Music Library and restore it from my backup (before I tried to tidy up by organizing everything by Artist/Album. To the best of my recollection (I now sound like a lawyer, which I’m not), the problem began after I ripped and loaded about 50 albums yesterday and began organizing them. I will update my post with my findings.

Thanks once again for your guidance.

I would use MP3Tag, free (it works on all music formats) to check how the tags have been set up.

Well, I restored My Music Library from an old backup, but the results are the same: Unknown Album - Unknown Artist. The backup was created a few years ago, before I began Ripping my own CDs; however, the albums were Ripped by a friend, and I don’t know what methodology he used. It seems odd that both his Rips and my Rips would experience the same issues.

Later today, I will Rip one album, store it in a new Library and see if it generates the same errors. If it does, then I will have to contact Sonos Tech Support as it could be a software bug. I will post my results first to keep you in the loop.

I re-Ripped 9 CDs and loaded them into a virgin folder, and then Added the new folder to Sonos Music Library on my desktop computer. So far, no extraneous unknowns! I hate to say it, but now I’m faced with re-Ripping more than 100 CDs - 50 from yesterday and more than 50 that my friend Ripped several years ago. I have not rearranged any of the Artists or Albums, which may have caused the problem, although I can’t readily see why. I have a theory but will wait until I complete Ripping more CDs before sharing. in case I’m wrong. Again, I will let you know if the new library becomes corrupt like the old one.

In theory, although I don't advise it, all the tracks could be in one folder - the Sonos library is only interested in tags. It's not so good for dealing with things like a ‘Greatest Hits’ album by ‘Various’ artists.

When you remove the share I assume it all disappears.  When you add it again, if you then get the issue then the duplicates have to be in that Share.  I don't believe the Sonos library can have two entries for the same physical file so there must be duplicates that are accessible..

The troubleshooting options available to users in these instances (even seeing path names for library entries) is severely limited.

The file paths don’t matter a damn, in fact you will save memory in the Sonos database by using eg c:\music\a\b\c\d.mp3 instead of the example you quoted. It is the mp3 Tags that are important when displaying data for the files, not the pathnames.

Could be worth removing the Celine Dion folder too.

And keep it like that. 😁