Sonos Controller - Duplicate Album Titles

Yep!

This.

--Brian

note that the “long something issue” has been reported to affect other albums / songs (other than the one that shows up wrong). Without knowing something real (from Sonos, say), it’s very difficult to qualify this issue. I convinced there is some issue around long names, since I was able to fix my issues by shortening some. But it’s easy to believe there are other things going on, and/or that this bug manifests itself in strange ways.

It wouldn't surprise me to hear there is an issue with the indexing but since that is internal to the speakers, not the app, I would be surprised if the fix was announced in any detail.

With no user access to the logs and error messages there is nothing we can do to fix things. Maybe work around them, which is why the shortening was worth looking at, but we are waiting on Sonos for the cure.

gonna be a long wait!

I've been struggling with the issue of albums being shown multiple times. Renaming the album folder fixed then problem for that album but shifted it to another. I posted several times about it earlier this year but couldn't solve it so I just kept going until it was only "unimportant" albums that were effected and then I just stopped add anything new to my music library. Until yesterday, when I added a few new albums and the problem resumed.

But following the suggestion here on the number of characters in the file path/name of the MP3 file, I not only renamed the folders corresponding to the effected albums, but dramatically shortened them. I edited the folder names as it's less disruptive than editing file names, or trying to change the entire file path for the share on my NAS, which is quite long. On reindexing, then albums corrected themselves (as expected) but no new problems were created (unexpected).

Just to be clear, the longest file path in any of the albums was 157 characters, so inside the limit. And these are not then longest file paths in my library - some albums which indexed fine have longer ones. So it's certainly not a clearcut issue about file path length. And it may be nothing to do with file paths at all, and I just got lucky. But if you have this frustrating problem, it's worth a try.

Thanks for that info. I think you may have just got lucky. Having said that I've finally set up a copy of my music library on another NAS drive I've got kicking around. This will allow me to mess with that copy without ruining my main library.

Taking your findings as a starting place the path to the copy library is shorter to start with. I am considering removing all folders withing the library to just having a very long list of tracks. That would remove a good few characters from the path to each track. I know it sounds drastic, but it isn't going to damage my main library. I might also consider shortening all the track file names as a test as well. When I get round to it I'll post my findings on this community page.

From my past investigations prompted by this and other threads there seems to be no correlation between path lengths and duplicate albums appearing/shifting across the collection, other than staying within the recommended limit. Even that though seems negligible...

The only impact I can think it may have is the contribution to index size overall rather than individual file names. 

Recent changes to indexing for example (addition of 'both') seems to have excluded some of my longer playlists from processing via app... I can only conclude this is because the change has altered the index itself and so the internal processing and referencing functionality.

Either way it would seem there is still an issue here that Sonos need to address...

Thanks for that, I'm not denying that Sonos still has a underlying issue with this but I've got some spare time coming up so I just thought a few experiments wouldn't go a miss. In fact my idea of getting rid of album folders might have problems as some tracks will have the same name. I did consider actually replacing the file name of each track with nothing more than a number. Like I said this would be on a copy of my library so if it breaks it it's only going to wreck the copy.

In your post you mentioned a recommended limit, I wasn't aware there was a recommended limit to file names. Can you tell me what the recommended limit is and where did you find it, thanks.

​@Anthony_6 

I can’t seem to find any duplicate albums in my library of approximately 47,000 tracks.  My path is Storage-Music-Genre-Artist-Album-Tracks.  Is your path longer than that?   Are the names of the folders in your path very long?  I can’t see any reason to eliminate album folders.  Could your issue be the tags have too much information?  I hesitate to believe tags are a problem either as one member who posted a screenshot of his tags, which had only the necessary information, still had duplicate albums.
 

I’m baffled by all the folks in this community that have duplicate albums.  I’m sure the issue exists.  Just have no idea what causes it.  Hope there is clarification eventually.