Sonos Controller - Duplicate Album Titles

Yeah, I always used the windows desktop for library stuff, but when my win computer blew up I got a mac, so I use that now. My preferred controller, SonoPad, doesn’t do any library maintenance at all, unfortunately.

It would be very un “sonos like”, but if they would just give an error message instead of indexing incorrectly it would be pretty sw8 for a lot of ppl….

I see the Bliss stuff, from 2016 so it is likely S1, SMB v1 related. The sonos.custhelp.com referred to can't be found from my network, nxdomain error.

Couldn't  find any other pages in the top 10 on my search engine.

Couldn't find a SMB Samba document giving maximum file and path lengths. 

It’s not an SMB thing. It’s the Sonos firmware that does the indexing. I use SMB 2, fwiw. I’m sure there’s more to it, but I shortened my filenames down to what google said and it worked for me.

Here’s the start of what google says:

 

Sonos has specific, albeit sometimes soft, limits on file paths and folder names within a local music library to ensure the system can index and display them properly. 

Folder and File Path Limits

• Total Path Length: For optimal performance, the entire file path—including the folder names, subfolder names, and the file name itself—should be kept under 180 characters.
• Maximum Limit: While some systems might handle more, paths approaching 186–255 characters are likely to cause severe indexing issues, with 187+ characters often resulting in the file not loading at all.
• Folder Structure: It is recommended to keep folder names short and simple, such as using Artist/Album/Song rather than long, descriptive paths. 

   

  Sonos Community +2

here is the search results beginning:
 

Sonos has specific, albeit sometimes soft, limits on file paths and folder names within a local music library to ensure the system can index and display them properly. 

Folder and File Path Limits

• Total Path Length: For optimal performance, the entire file path—including the folder names, subfolder names, and the file name itself—should be kept under 180 characters.
• Maximum Limit: While some systems might handle more, paths approaching 186–255 characters are likely to cause severe indexing issues, with 187+ characters often resulting in the file not loading at all.
• Folder Structure: It is recommended to keep folder names short and simple, such as using Artist/Album/Song rather than long, descriptive paths. 

   

  Sonos Community +2

It’s all very well discussing file size limits and file name lengths, and I’m not saying that doesn’t make a difference to some people’s libraries. But my library was perfectly fine until around September / October when I started seeing false duplicates. I hadn’t added any new music or changed my tags for a long time. Stupidly I did have Sonos set to index my library every day at midnight, a pointless exercise when I’m not adding lots of new albums. I’ve turned that off now so it only gets indexed when I do add new albums, very infrequently.
 

About 3 weeks ago I did make a copy of my library and carried out some experiments with it. Unfortunately it didn’t prove anything conclusive. However I may re-visit that and take a look at removing / changing some tags and see what that comes up with. See my post about this on page 4 of this thread.

Consider the possibility that the “new improved” indexer will not tolerate quite as many characters in the tags and some of your formerly close to the limit tags are now over the limit.

Well, isn't it up to Sonos to make that clear. They should then give instructions on what the requirements are. All I'm seeing when I search the web is a lot of conflicting information with no backing from Sonos.

Just pursuing a line of thought so can I just ask... Are people seeing this issue consistently on the desktop as well as the phone apps?

Mac or PC but specifically PC... 🤔

 My path is very simple.  Maybe that’s why I can’t find any duplicate albums, at least not yet.  Path= Genre - Artist - Album ( Tracks ).  Tags= Artist - Track Name - Album - Track No. - Date - Album Artist.  Nothing else in the tags.  No folder names or track names are crazy long.  For classical the Artist & Album Artist are the last name of the composer.  I don’t put the composer’s name in the track names.  I add new music around once every two weeks.  No index issues.  My share name is IP Address etc.