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RogerWF
Enthusiast II
October 20, 2025

Sonos Controller - Duplicate Album Titles

  • 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):

 

File list for album tracks

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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    251 replies

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    Corry P
    Corry P
    Sonos Staff
    January 27, 2026

    Hi ​@Anthony_6 

    ​@Ian_S 

    Hi, I think I may have stumbled on something. If I remove & add my library using the browse option it adds my server under its server name. I then get six albums duplicated. When I manually add the library using my server IP address I get one duplicated album. I’ve tried repeating it and I always get the same six or one album depending on use of IP address or name.

    That’s pretty interesting. I’ll look into this tomorrow (my shift ends in 5 minutes). Thanks for flagging/helping.

    "Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." - Albert Einstein
    Ian_S
    Prodigy III
    January 27, 2026

    ​@Anthony_6 - Cue another ‘bug’ on the Era 300 speaker. It won’t let you index or add a share with a name. It has to be an IP address… So I’m stuck with the IP address as the Era (being much faster it seems in processing than my other speakers) usually ends up being the associated product, so unless I use the IP address of the NAS in the share name, it refuses to re-index or add a new share. Interesting to know that also causes different behaviour.

    I’m wondering if there are issues in the SMB access in the embedded Linux kernel beyond configuration! 

    Ian_S
    Prodigy III
    January 27, 2026

    ​@Corry P - new case number raised. Need to try and schedule a phone call. 

      RogerWFAuthor
      Enthusiast II
      January 28, 2026

       

      Hi, Ian,

      Thanks for the info. Sounded promising, so I tried the same thing. Result was an improvement:  I went from 11 false duplicates to only 3. Then I made a minor change to the library (just added one track to an existing playlist and saved), and reindexed. Now I have 5 false duplicates - one of the earlier 3 and then four new ones.

      Like most other cases, each of the ‘duplicates’ shows just one track, except for one (the one that persisted) - one of its three duplicate entries shows just one track, but the other two show all tracks except for the one listed in the first entry.

      Still a bug…

      Thanks again,

      Roger

       

      User117655
      User117655
      Prodigy II
      January 28, 2026

      ​@RogerWF My experience too, like I said before the issue seems to drift across artists/albums and is not always consistent with the duplications either... I am also seeing omissions in the search results!

      Ian_S
      Prodigy III
      January 28, 2026

      ​@Corry P - new case number raised. Need to try and schedule a phone call. 

      ​@Corry P That was an effort. Getting past L1 on the phone was horrible. Not what I expect of any company. The escalation contact was much, much better. He’s passing it onto engineering, so hopefully it will get some attention. You may struggle to get more people to do this if they have to try and explain it to your first line of phone support. 

        Corry P
        Corry P
        Sonos Staff
        January 28, 2026

        Hi ​@Ian_S 

        Sorry to hear that, but it is kind of expected when a new issue arises - they have no documentation on it, but they do have steps to try to follow. Things should go much smoother now.

        I have tried indexing my own library with the server’s IP address in the path instead of with the server’s name, and I did get two albums show as duplicates that I did not get before then. I managed to fix the metadata for them, however, and they now no longer show as duplicates regardless of whether I use the IP address or server name. So, while the behaviour does seem inconsistent, the underlying issue can still - seemingly, in my case at least - be solved by fixing the metadata. I recommend that you do this, though I’d also ask you to maybe keep an unaltered backup of the problem media so we can examine the differences in metadata for you, to try and understand what is going wrong.

        I hope this helps.

         

         

        "Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." - Albert Einstein
          Ian_S
          Prodigy III
          January 28, 2026

          Hi ​@Ian_S 

          Sorry to hear that, but it is kind of expected when a new issue arises - they have no documentation on it, but they do have steps to try to follow. Things should go much smoother now.

          I have tried indexing my own library with the server’s IP address in the path instead of with the server’s name, and I did get two albums show as duplicates that I did not get before then. I managed to fix the metadata for them, however, and they now no longer show as duplicates regardless of whether I use the IP address or server name. So, while the behaviour does seem inconsistent, the underlying issue can still - seemingly, in my case at least - be solved by fixing the metadata. I recommend that you do this, though I’d also ask you to maybe keep an unaltered backup of the problem media so we can examine the differences in metadata for you, to try and understand what is going wrong.

          I hope this helps.

           

           

          ​@Corry P - I don’t see what the metadata issue is, so really don’t know how to fix it. Album artist, Album name are all correct and the same… the fact that different speakers handle it differently and can cope or not is odd. Will leave as is for now as at least it’s reproducible should the Sonos engineering team need to look first hand. I can’t really go back to a SMB name as then the Era 300 is effectively useless for me as it stops playing any file, let alone index them! 

            Corry P
            Corry P
            Sonos Staff
            January 28, 2026

            HI ​@Ian_S 

            Yeah, fair enough - lets keep things as they are so the team can examine it all. I agree there is something odd happening.

            "Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." - Albert Einstein
              Anthony_6
              Collaborator II
              January 28, 2026

              Hi ​@Corry P & ​@Ian_S 

              This is exactly why I don’t want contact support. I went through all this back in October, and nothing happened. I’m afraid it’s a tactic used by many tech companies to put people off contacting them. Basically 1st level support is to fob you off and to try and convince you it’s your fault that it doesn’t work. I spent over an hour with the first contact at Sonos & for nothing. Sadly since the Patrick Spence affair it’s become difficult to trust Sonos on anything. But I will say that ​@Corry P is an example of good customer care, keep up the good work.

              Anyway, it’s great that ​@Ian_S persevered, I just hope that someone does take this issue seriously.

              If I’m feeling brave I might just contact support again in the hope that it may reinforce ​@Ian_S .

              Anthony
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