playback issue

The problem is that the Sonos app tries to load the entire playlist into the queue, and 10 seconds is not enough time for larger lists. Possible fixes from Sonos would be:

1. Increase the timeout, but then starting playback will take ages for large playlists
2. Not grabbing the whole playlist in one gulp, but getting it in chunks (each chunk < 10 seconds)
3. #2 plus starting playback after the first chunk

To be fair Sonos do recommend that music services limit their containers to 500 items for this very reason, but no-one does because that’s a worse problem IMHO.

I have tried implementing #2 as an experiment in my Windows app, but loading the queue is the blockage and I’m only seeing a 50% success rate, plus it takes ages.

File names and meta data size play a large role in the maximum tracks in playlists and the Queue. Here’s a playlist that I cooked up and loaded into the Queue. There is sill some room in the Queue for adding a few more tracks.

Next I added a small music playlist to the Queue. We are not yet at the end of the road. The absolute limit would be 65,000 tracks for the Queue.

The Queue size limit (65535) is not the issue here though, the problem is the loading time from the music service and the speed with which those items can be added to the queue. Plus the playlist Buzz is loading appears to be a Sonos one, which is a very different beast to a music service one (the playlist and the queue are on the same device, no network calls required).

Orthogonal: I find queue updates are one of the most brutal events to handle in the app, as it is challenging to figure out how to efficiently update the UX without having to reload the entire queue, and to do it quickly enough that you can handle the next queue update message in a timely fashion.