Avid Contributor I

SonoPhone and Large Playlists

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
February 6, 2025
13 replies
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I recently migrated my music library to Plex, which I thought was going to be nice because access to my music library is available as a “Music Service” in the Sonos S1 controller.

I have some very large smart playlists (thousands of tracks). I ran into the “20 second timeout” issue that Sonos S1 apparently has when loading a playlist. If I cut my smart playlist roughly in half, it loads fine, so I’m pretty sure it’s the timeout issue that’s causing the problem. I don’t think that it’s related to the length of the playlist, as I have no problem going into my music library and shuffling the entire library, which is many many more songs than what I’m currently trying to load from Plex.

I was wondering if anyone that has experience with the SonoPhone app knows how it handles very large Plex playlists?

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Ken_Griffiths

I have always thought that it was a 15 second time out for Sonos services…? I’m not sure though if the Plex service within Sonos might also have a playlist track limit. How many tracks are in your playlists that fail? How many in those that work okay?

A

atebitAuthor

Avid Contributor I

Fail: more than 5000

Work: More than 2300

But what I really want to know is if anyone’s tried this with SonosPhone yet. I don’t have any hope that native Sonos apps are going to work for me.

Airgetlam

Perhaps posting on the SonoPhone support boards may get you a better target group reading about your issue?

Bruce

A

atebitAuthor

Avid Contributor I

AFAIK, there’s no such thing, and there’s a fair number of SonosPhone users here…

Not sure why people insist on answering not the question that was asked.

Airgetlam

Probably as this is a community forum, and lots of people want to help, even if it means understanding the issue better?

Bruce

Ken_Griffiths

Fail: more than 5000

Work: More than 2300

But what I really want to know is if anyone’s tried this with SonosPhone yet. I don’t have any hope that native Sonos apps are going to work for me.

Sorry I don’t use SonoPhone, but I can say the new Sonos App supports Plex playlists with over 5,000 tracks, as I just created a quick "test playlist" with 5085 tracks and that works okay here. I’ll add some more tracks and see how far I can get. I would have thought the S1 App would support this too… 🤔?

controlav

Lead Maestro

I am guessing SonoPhone will have the same issue, as it uses the same API, as do my apps.

I attempted to “fix” the large playlist problem in my own Windows app, by chopping it up. My telemetry indicates a 30% success rate in doing this, and even when it works, its an order of magnitude slower.

Author of the leading independent Sonos apps for Android, MacOS, iOS, Windows and Xbox.

A

atebitAuthor

Avid Contributor I

Fail: more than 5000

Work: More than 2300

But what I really want to know is if anyone’s tried this with SonosPhone yet. I don’t have any hope that native Sonos apps are going to work for me.

Sorry I don’t use SonoPhone, but I can say the new Sonos App supports Plex playlists with over 5,000 tracks, as I just created a quick "test playlist" with 5085 tracks and that works okay here. I’ll add some more tracks and see how far I can get. I would have thought the S1 App would support this too… 🤔?

Agreed...you would hope. :). But Sonos is always making claims as far as how “limited” the S1 memory is, etc.

Approximately how long did it take your huge Plex playlist to load? Maybe the timeout’s the same in S1 & S2, but S2 just has better performance to load it faster?

Also, I know that even though Plex & my S1 are on the same LAN, the stream path has to hairpin from my local Plex server to the cloud (AWS) and then back down to my S1s, just like any other sonos “Music Service”. Plex Server isn’t set to throttle streaming or uploading, so it should be going as fast as my Synology can.

I’m not sure what’s actually happening after I select the playlist on the S1 app & tap the shuffle icon...I as assume it’s not trying to pull down all the tracks at that point, but just some of the track metadata?

A

atebitAuthor

Avid Contributor I

I am guessing SonoPhone will have the same issue, as it uses the same API, as do my apps.

I attempted to “fix” the large playlist problem in my own Windows app, by chopping it up. My telemetry indicates a 30% success rate in doing this, and even when it works, its an order of magnitude slower.

That’s what I was afraid of. Can you please explain what the difference is between shuffling my entire music library (well over 6,000 tracks), which S1 does with no problems, vs shuffling my ~5K track Plex playlist? If there’s enough memory and cpu to handle the former, it seems like the latter should work, too (15-20 second load timeout not withstanding)?

Ken_Griffiths

I cleared the speaker queue and added another thousand tracks to the Plex ‘test playlist’ and that loads/plays without a problem in the new Sonos App too (6023 tracks) - Anyhow I later tried the same playlist with the old S1 System/App to see if it could handle the 6k+ tracks, but it fails - so probably a limitation of that old App.

I’d perhaps just try the 3rd party App you mention to see if that might work for you. The new Sonos App though works okay.

Screenshots attached.

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