Sonos Controller - Duplicate Album Titles

I have several albums by this artist.  Search seems to work normally here.  IOS phone app up to date.

I think it is part of the same issue as I have been seeing this for artists and albums and, like the albums, it moves across artists... It is not unique to, and I am sure will not permanently apply to, this artist...

Just thought I'd document it here!

Just tried artists on Android version of the app. Everything seems okay here.

I’ve seen this before, but not right now. It acted the same way in that, after an unrelated change to the library, the duplicate artist went away.

Every time I get a software update, I get hopeful that maybe this is it.  But after reindexing, I still have five false duplicates in my Albums list.  Interestingly, only two of the five are listed three times, while the other three are only in the list twice.  In any case, selecting any of the duplicate entries shows only one track.

But since someone brought up the issue of duplicate artists, too, I looked at that, since I hadn’t checked for that before.  And yes, I found one artist listed twice.  Selecting either name led me to the same one album.

And so it goes… (nod to KV 😉)

 I love your optimism 😀

I have created a ‘Feature Request’ topic around another search anomaly involving compilation albums:

Maybe there is a relationship, outside of them both seeming to be search/indexing related of course...

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

I’ve seen this happen before with local libraries on Sonos, and in most cases it’s related to how the metadata is being read rather than actual duplicate files. Even if the albums are identical, slight differences in tags (album artist, compilation flag, or even hidden characters in the album name) can cause Sonos to treat them as separate entries.

It can also help to remove the music library from Sonos, re-check the tags using a tool like Mp3tag, and then re-index everything from scratch. In some cases, restarting the NAS/service and clearing the Sonos cache resolves the issue as well.

Hope this helps.

Hi ​@LorenPettitt, and welcome to this long discussion of the duplicate album problem. Your advice is valid. However, in this case, there is an actual bug in Sonos library indexing that is causing this problem. There are a couple threads here related to this. Lots of info in this thread. And also this one started by Anthony_6:

There used to be a time when software was thoroughly tested before being released to the public. But I guess we the public are cheaper to use as guinea pigs.