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Sonos can't process large library, even if it is well below the 65,000 track limit... unless split into separate folders

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
June 14, 2022
24 replies
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I have a fairly large music library (~27,000 tracks), which is well below the 65,000 track limit. Recently, after adding some more tracks, I discovered that the Sonos library was only showing about 10% of the tracks… Somehow in the import/indexing process it had broken. I don’t know for sure, but while my library has about 800 album artists, it has far more actual artists (e.g. compilations), and the tracks I recently imported were compilations with many artists. So I suspect that the problem is related to the number of artists.

I was able to resolve the issue by splitting my library (on my NAS drive) between a compilations folder and “everything else.” When I did, Sonos was able to import/index the whole library. What that tells me is that I haven’t hit some limit for the library in general (i.e. it can handle all 27,000 tracks) but that the import/index process can’t handle all of the tracks when it runs the indexing process (possibly because of teh number of artists, but that’s just a guess.)

The problem is resolved, at least for now, but I worry that as I add music I will hit this limit again, and continuing to split my music library isn’t a great solution.

Has anyone else experienced this?

This seems to be something that Sonos could easily fix, as it clearly isn’t running up against any hard limit (e.g. memory or similar), otherwise it wouldn’t be able to handle my whole library (which it does.) i.e. This really seems like a bug in the import/indexing process that could be fixed.

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Ken_Griffiths

@anmatr,

I’ve just loaded all my local library onto a Sonos Move speaker queue, just to see how many tracks I presently have in my NAS library and there are 25,697 tracks that I am able manually re-index in the Sonos App in precisely 3 minutes - so I’m quite happy with that re-indexing time - it takes about 6 seconds to open the ‘All Tracks’ Playlist that I created and store within the library and the tracks begin playing (on shuffle) in another 6 seconds or so when I press play… So I’m quite pleased with the time it takes to index and begin playing every track I possess. That said, I have, over the years of building that library, always been very careful with the editing of the track metadata and album art and I do like to keep my music library in good order. I’m not really having any issues with the way the library works with Sonos, or any other App for that matter.

G

Graavarg

Contributor I

…

It states that I had this error coming over and over and did NO change at all to the files. Just by ignoring that error and doing the indexing again it eventually worked. But no error anywhere to see. So this does not point to any faulty/oversized metadata at all (because nothing on the files was changed). All I am pointing out and trying to make people (and Sonos!) aware is that the software that they deliver to a very pricy hardware is mediocre, faulty, incomplete and tedious to use. The only way I could manage the library is to split it into 3 folders with each of them having about 90 folders.

It takes far too much time to make use of the music library features.

Just confirming that I have the same error, now for the second time. The first time I got around by removing my library and adding it back in chunks, the re-indexing after every added chunk. Which is technically close to your solution, splitting your collection in parts.

Today I lost access to my collection due to the “no selection available”, without changing a thing (and everything has been working fine for weeks).

My re-indexing also times out with a “not available”-error, which is total BS. It takes a looong time before posting the error, so my guess is faulty code. I deduced the same thing you did, the collection (I am at 28k tracks) is well within the limit, but indexing process is flawed. I’ll be damned if I am going to remove and re-copy everything once again just to get my library working again. This sucks big time.

Finally, I can't remember but I do think I got the error after an update last time, and I had an update pending this morning. So updating seems to “crash” a functioning library, and if it is big enough it will not re-index.

Going to parse the MP3 tags, just to be sure. But there it is completely illogical that a functional library would suddenly become dysfunctional due to some tag, especially since not a single byte was changed.

G

Graavarg

Contributor I

Going to parse the MP3 tags, just to be sure. But there it is completely illogical that a functional library would suddenly become dysfunctional due to some tag, especially since not a single byte was changed.

So, I ripped all tags from 28k tracks into Excel, and lo and behold there were 11 tracks with faulty tags, spread over 7 (totally) different albums. By “faulty” I mean corrupt (strange bitrate numbers is a good indicator). Checked them with MP3Tag, interestingly the tags do seem to work in MP3Tag, but the codec info is missing, the bitrate is strange and the Tag field lists them as “ID3v2.3 Error”.

I removed these files from my collection, and now the re-indexing goes through (though it took > 7 minutes, which is unusual) and I have my library back. I can’t be 100% sure this was the reason (since SONOS has imported them twice before), but if faulty tags can mess up the re-indexing process it might be down to “code”.

Thanks to @Ken_Griffiths for suggesting a re-check of the tags!

Airgetlam

Just remember, there’s one Sonos device that is parsing the index, so you can see variable speeds depending on all sorts things, from network speed to CPU speed on the Sonos device. If you can ‘force’ the index process to occur on a newer Sonos, it should be quicker than an older Sonos that has a slower CPU.

Bruce

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