Enthusiast II

Sonos Controller - Duplicate Album Titles

Forum|Forum|11 months ago
October 20, 2025
251 replies
3207 views

Just an update to a previously reported issue Duplicate album names queued together | Sonos Community. I have this album on my music library (apologies for some of the titles, but that’s the way it is):

The album is listed three times in the controller:

Selecting any one of the duplicate titles shows only one track:

These results are the same on the Windows, Android, and web controllers. I reindexed before collecting this info. I should add that queueing any one of the duplicate titles only adds one track to the queue.

I emailed this info to Sonos support.

Moderator Note: Removed and recorded case number

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kdowling

Whatever the (unspecified) requirements are, they must not be the same as S1. Because my S1 system is using the same library on my NAS and this problem does not exist on S1.

Or, more likely, there is a bug that got introduced last September and Sonos can’t find it. This problem didn’t exist prior to that update. All this discussion about tags and path lengths being the problem is crazy. This problem DIDN’T EXIST prior to that update last September.

A

Anthony_6

Collaborator II

Whatever the (unspecified) requirements are, they must not be the same as S1. Because my S1 system is using the same library on my NAS and this problem does not exist on S1.

Or, more likely, there is a bug that got introduced last September and Sonos can’t find it. This problem didn’t exist prior to that update. All this discussion about tags and path lengths being the problem is crazy. This problem DIDN’T EXIST prior to that update last September.

Yes, I hear you loud and clear, all we're doing is trying to hide the problem that Sonos should be fixing. But as I and others have said I don't think enough of us are using Sonos this way any more. Sonos seem to be more interested in home cinema setups or streaming from the likes of Spotify etc.They've certainly forgotten their roots of a high quality stereo home audio system for primarily listening to music.

I really wish I'd hadn't got rid of my original zone players when Sonos made the awful decision to brick them. Yet another Sonos disaster situation.

Anthony

A

Anthony_6

Collaborator II

@Anthony_6

They ain’t cheap. I bought mine from a friend who uses cloud servers now.

Yes I saw the price.

Anthony

Stanley_4

Grand Maestro

The Samba module, what Linux uses to provide the SMB protocol, was given a huge re-write. The new version of the module was too big for the original Sonos devices which is why they stayed with SMB v1 for so long and a major incentive for the S1 to S2 split. Allowing devices with adequate memory resources to run the new code while keeping the older devices usable.

So yes the old and new SMB versions have many differences, since I don't use SMB outside Sonos I haven't kept up with the details.

kdowling

The Samba module, what Linux uses to provide the SMB protocol, was given a huge re-write. The new version of the module was too big for the original Sonos devices which is why they stayed with SMB v1 for so long and a major incentive for the S1 to S2 split. Allowing devices with adequate memory resources to run the new code while keeping the older devices usable.

So yes the old and new SMB versions have many differences, since I don't use SMB outside Sonos I haven't kept up with the details.

While all true, that doesn’t explain why this problem started with an S2 update in September when it was already using SMB v2/v3 prior to that.

We’ve been discussing this problem since last October. See Anthony_6’s thread for a refresher:

Albums have suddenly started to behave strangely.

Stanley_4

Grand Maestro

I was addressing kdowling's S1 S2 changes post up few.

I'm well aware of the duplicate issue. Have it here and wasted a lot of time trying to sort it out.

Until the programmers at Sonos get a better handle on the codebase we are going to keep seeing issues like this and they are going to be hard to get fixed.

Been there, done that at past jobs when management decided to "fix" the development department and lost control of the process.

A

Anthony_6

Collaborator II

Hi everyone.

So as I said yesterday, with some time on my hands, I made a copy of my music library on a seperate NAS drive. I placed the library in a folder called Media. I then proceeded to extract all tracks from the Album folders, this created a long list of tracks. During that process some tracks were auto renamed with a suffix (2) etc. That was expected as some tracks had the same name as others. After doing this I sorted the list by file type, this resulted in finding numerous files that were not music related, PDF, Thumbs.db, PNG & quite a lot of Desktop.ini files. I deleted those files (remember I’m working on a copy). I then used a re-name program to sort the files by title, I then replaced the title with a simple incrementing number with leading zeros padding, 0001, 0002 etc. I did that so that I would know that each track would have the same name length, the tracks do have .flac, .mp3 & .m4A extensions which does mean the tracks would vary between 8 & 9 characters. so coupled with the file path I worked out that the path & file length would be \\LS01Backup\Media (18) I assume you count the backslashes, so 18 + 9 = 27 characters. I stand to be corrected on this. But in my mind I don’t think you could get much shorter than this.

I then got Sonos to index this. I’d love to tell you I didn't have any duplicates, but no I got 2 duplicates, but this time the duplicates were different. Usually I find that a duplicate only contains 1 track, the same track in each copy. On this occasion the duplicates contained all but one track, in both cases the first track was missing.

I know that this probably doesn't help anyone, but it was worth a try😏 I guess it seems to highlight that path length doesn't make that much difference. My library is quite small compared to many, only 8265 tracks.

So back to Sonos!

Anthony