Sonos Controller - Duplicate Album Titles

Hi ​@Anthony_6 

That is fair feedback and I will pass it up the chain.

Please be aware, however, that the vast majority of calls are resolved by support agents following basic steps outlined in their documentation. Outlying cases such as these have to be confirmed to be outlying cases, and that takes some time. If we assumed every report of an issue from a customer was a unique problem, we’d never get any of them fixed as we’d be too busy investigating everything. 

Please also bear in mind that issues are assigned a higher priority according to how many customers are affected - if this issue does indeed get in the way of you enjoying your music as you’d like to, I recommend that you get another case assigned to this new ticket, as that will result in the issue having a higher priority. Having said that, there are clear inconsistencies here, so my feeling is that it will get addressed sooner or later.

​@Corry P yes I was a little harsh on 1st level support, the chap I spoke to in October was nothing but pleasant. I should know having worked in retail selling tech. Complaints such as “this iPad doesn’t work”, you are aware the battery needs to be charged sir! 😂

​@Corry P, ​@Anthony_6 

Just for clarity, after Corry’s comments last night about adding to the case, I used the chat service as it was past the service hours for phone, to try and just add the links to the two main threads on here. The AI chatbot just put me straight through to an agent, who was polite, read the links, and said it would need to be escalated, and would require me to phone to further progress… He put it in a new ticket, but that’s fine. So I called this morning and the person who answered didn’t bother to read the links and just assumed that this was a simple not knowing how to add a share, and was insistent on trying to take me through it. I had to argue with them quite strongly just to get them to stop and read the links. They did this while I was on hold for about 20 mins and then put me through to someone in the Netherlands on the escalation team, who did listen & read the links… 

It would have been near on impossible to explain this on the phone to someone like that without being able to provide screenshots etc. like you can here. So, completely get that calls need screening and many are simple fixes, but the agents could at least read anything in the case before going off on a completely wrong path. Had I not had the threads here I would have just given up, and probably just requested a refund on the speaker. 

Thanks for the feedback, ​@Ian_S - it’s all valuable!

Getting quite comical. No, sad.

Just to add my experience: I have had a ticket opened on this issue for quite some time now. I have had SONOS L2 online looking live at my system. I have uploaded sample ‘problem’ albums to Dropbox for them to work with. I have had multiple email exchanges with different people (who I won’t name), but here is the latest email text (received Monday 1/26/2026):

“If you run that album through your ID3 tag software, are there any differences in the metadata from track to track?”

I replied with the screen shot shown below and have heard nothing since. Meanwhile, as I indicated earlier in this thread, I made a slight change to a playlist, reindexed, and the album shown in the screen shot is no longer among the false duplicates.

IMO they need a debug version of the indexing code that they can run in-situ to see if it sheds any light on what the speaker is seeing. Of course, running debug code may well cause different behaviour, but it lets them see if nothing else that the speaker is at least seeing the correct tracks from the NAS. If it ‘works’ with debug code, that is often an indication of a memory issue such as using a move instead of copy for instance where behaviour can become unpredictable. Either way it moves you forward. 

If we know copying the files within the environment changes behaviour, it’s unlikely copying files to a dropbox will shed any light. If one speaker can correctly index the files and another can’t then I’m struggling to see how it’s related to the actual metadata… 

Just my thoughts. 

OK, so a bit more playing on my behalf has added to my understanding here. 

The associated product is for a session only between an individual controller and the Sonos system. My previous testing was using an iMac with the Sonos App constantly open, so rebooting/powering off speakers does change the AP… however, after playing with my MacBook, I can see that it picked a different AP to the iMac, and actually if I just closed and re-opened the Mac Sonos App, it seems to pick different speakers quite frequently, So, although you can’t guarantee which one it will pick, if you stop/start it enough it does seem to eventually pick the speaker you might want. Would have saved me a lot of reboots if I’d figured that out earlier!!

However, once you have the AP you ‘want’, then the behaviour remains the same, and I guess some further evidence is that with two Mac controllers simultaneously open pointing at different AP’s, I don’t get different libraries which is a relief… so there is just one speaker that indexes the library and propagates that to the others, it’s just not as fixed as I thought it was. 

I am now curious which speaker Sonos chooses (and why) to perform a scheduled re-index… I have turned this off since May ‘24 as it just trashed my system and manually updating when I add music is not that painful… however can see it might result in changing libraries for some with the wrong system combinations if the scheduled indexing speaker moves around. 

I can also see why people ask for the ability to specify a preferred speaker for controllers to interact with as there’s a noticeable performance difference between some kit. Era 300 is very fast, a Port with an ethernet connection seems a reasonable second. 

Hi ​@Ian_S 

I’m curious to know how you find out which product is the associated product (AP). I only knew when I tested things because I had actually physically turned off all AP’s except one, therefore I knew by default it had to be the one left powered up. 

As far as I know, you can only do it from one of the desktop controllers, Windows or Mac, I use Mac. The about your system menu still lists the associated product IP at the top. On the new apps, phone/tablet, they removed it, so apart from only having one speaker powered on, you don’t know. 

Okay, I see it now on Windows app, thank you. I can see that one of my Amps is the AP.