Music Library Out of Sync

bockersjv

I downloaded MP3tag at your suggestion. Thanks. Its user interface seems more flexible with options than what I’ve been using. Thank you for the recommendation.

For those who have been watching and contributing to this thread, thank you. As promised, here is my theory (right or wrong) and my going forward strategy.

Theory:

There are under-the-cover connectors between Artist and Album, and when I moved Albums to another folder I broke these connections which created unknown entities.

Strategy:

Even though my Music Library plays fine on my desktop and in my cars, I’ve decided to trash my old Music Library and start anew, re-Ripping over 100 CDs. I’ve begun the process and ripped 11 CDs so far, checking periodically to see if the Sonos app detects any broken links. So far, so good. There may be an easier approach, but for me proceeding down the simple path seems less traumatic.

If you read the points made above you will hopefully accept your theory and strategy are wrong. Moving files will not and cannot create unknown entities.

Answering my question regarding removing the Share and is the library empty and then re-adding, do the issues reappear would help.

sjw, 

I don’t understand “removing the Share.”

What I have noticed is that the unknown Artists and unknown Albums only appear in my Sonos Apps (desktop and iPhone). I have tried deleting them but have not found a way to do it. (Repeating from my previous post: the Library plays fine on my desktop and in both cars; only Sonos is an issue.)

I’d recommend ripping your CDs in a lossless format (FLAC is good) to a master directory, outside of any Sonos sharing. The files there to remain just as ripped.

Make a copy of the ripped files and use your tag editor to populate the tags as you would like them. Also fetch any album art you wish to have present. If you blow something up here you can go to the master copy and recover it. Tweak any tags, file names or paths that need to be adjusted to meet Sonos requirements here too.

Make a third copy from the altered files above and use that for your music library.

Consider also trans-coding the modified music collection to a lossy format for use directly in other audio devices. My car only holds a small part of my music in FLAC but holds most of it in MP3 and I keep some favorites on my travel laptop.

With the master copy, tweaked copy as your sources you have the ability to make further copies and alterations while always being able to replace any destroyed data with a simple copy.

I keep both of the copies mentioned here on an off-line storage device to prevent loss if there is a catastrophic event destroying connected hardware.

Stanley_4,

My background is in computer software development and hardware design, but working with music files is a new experience for me. I’m not familiar with lingo, such as Tag Editor and trans-coding. In such situations I often opt for simple solutions, although sometimes they require more work. Saturday was a rainy day, a good day for ripping CDs. I finished ripping all my CDs: 895 files, 155 folders, 7,596,576,768 bytes. The are no errors, and no unknown anythings. Life is good as long as I don’t try to move files around.

I sincerely appreciate all your posts, suggestions and encouragement. Thank you very much.

Tag editor: https://www.mp3tag.de/en/index.html

Trans-coding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcoding

Ripping can be great fun (not) but it can be made less painful. The Tag Editor will let you update the internal data in the audio files making them more Sonos (and other players) friendly. Batch mode is a huge time saver there.

Trans-coding to lower quality is really handy.

Flac: 131.3 GiB 8,410 files, 637 sub-folders (NAS / Sonos version)

MP3: 29.6 GiB (Honda internal drive version)

I actually bought a computer (old outdated but 10 cores) and added a bunch of SATA CD drives to rip from. It would happily rip 7 CDs at a time and all I had to do was wait for a drive to pop open and stick in a fresh CD, then click the rip button for that drive again. Amazing how quickly it ran through my CD library. Passed it on to a son that needs a number cruncher for his audio projects.

Stanley_4,

Thanks for the homework assignment. I will look into the referenced links. I appreciate your sharing all this good information. I can imagine what you are saying based on my software development experiences of a bygone era. 

Steve

I too used to do software development, mostly Unix at work and ‘80 assembler at home.

I still do home-brew hardware stuff although I’m much fonder of the Raspberry Pi than wire-wrapping a Z-80 SBC. 

To whet your appetite here is a screenshot from a tag editor, EasyTag, that I use on Linux.