Won't Update Music Library, Part 2

Before I break the seal on the box at 6PM PT tonight, can someone please give me some confidence that the WD Ethernet drive I linked to will work?

You, your brother-in-law, or your friend are likely not pushing anything to even being close to their limits @Alonzo Mosley  - a line-in source will, under normal circumstances, happily play to every Sonos speaker in the same system - you can even adjust the audio buffer to cater for such line-in audio and can compress that audio too… plus when playing across grouped rooms there is an option to set the size of an audio buffer - but without detail, it’s still difficult to pass comment about the issues faced, as you are only presenting scant detail about your friends and brother-in-law’s issues.

All I can say is, if it’s possible to do something in Sonos, then in my own experience, it will usually work well and in ‘most’ cases where it doesn’t, it’s usually either a network issue, or sometimes a hardware issue …and of course it can sometimes be a users understanding of how things work. 

Your NAS however and the way it’s setup is not anything I’ve ever come across before and as @ratty mentions the G partition when connected to the router plus the path //RJBMUSIC/g/seamusic is very unusual to the extent I would go back to the device manufacturers support desks and ask them how to access the SMB share… it clearly does not work the way most ‘similar’ shared SMB drives work.

Many here have tried to help, but it’s time to speak with the makers of your hardware and see if they can put you on the right track.

More detail will be needed to solve you’re friends and brother-in-law issues. I recommend you advise them to post in the forum separately, or perhaps contact Sonos Support via this LINK

Or get that MyCloud NAS from your link and listen to your music….

I’m not trying to diagnose anyone’s problems but mine, I’m just demonstrating that in my subset of “real” people I know with Sonos equipment, no one is happy with their purchase. But, to paraphrase Churchill, it may be the worst but it’s better than the alternative.

It just strains credulity that this issue - the lack of updating, then the lack of adding - is rooted in network hardware, which has been replaced twice; controllers, four of which have been replaced and run on three different operating systems; or storage hardware, which has been replaced twice. The only thing that has remained constant - and which has so far remained blameless - is the software. (I know it hasn’t remained constant constant, there have been updates, but I have no way of tracking that…!)

I have managed to mount all of my mini-subdirectories, save one, but they will not “Update” - either on the 2AM scheduled or when I push an Update. From Android:

I have a router coming - not the Netgear but an Asus AX6000 -  and the ethernet MyCloud coming tonight. I will open one. Which? @sjw comes in with a last-second vote for the drive. Anyone else?

(The documentation on my existing router is weak. Which of course is why I’m currently stuck with that weird “partition” (in quotes because I don’t think that means what they think it means) and why I can’t answer any of the router-related questions. The old router - a TP-Link AC1900 - is already at Goodwill. And caused problems anyway).

And, I guess, what’s the big improvement between that drive and the USB? Is it that the Cat-6 cable has better data integrity than a USB 3.0? Or is there an OS in the drive that gives it stability?

A “real” NAS has its own operating system, CPU,  memory, and settings, none of which exist in a thumb drive attached to a router that is “treating” the external memory as an NAS is some simulated fashion. 

The issue isn't with USB or ‘data integrity', it seems it's more like its implementation/connectivity with the router.

A NAS will more than likely give other functionality too and better control of users and permissions/access.

The only reason I chose that word is based on the sporadic nature of the connection - sometimes it makes it, sometimes it doesn’t; it seems to be kinda sorta related to the size of the data read (a low r value, for sure, but it seems more than just coincidence).

Sounds like @Airgetlam is advocating to hook up the MyDrive vs. the router.

(Although now I’m worried -  This is the one I bought, and everything I read yesterday made it seem like it would fit the bill. But I just saw on the WD site “Unlike a NAS...” It does have an RJ45 connection, but that doesn’t sound like that’s the distinction that I need.

So should I return that and get something like this one or this one? (I can’t begin to attempt to fathom something like @Ken_Griffiths ‘ “old Netgear NAS boxes (mirrored drives), which I added more RAM too to keep them going - currently running the latest Netgear OS6 operating system (Linux-based)”…

Well the good news is, the WD MyCloud fell off the delivery truck and the Synology one should be here in the AM. The router made it,but I'm holding off on that.

The one I mentioned to get from your links specifically said Network Attached Storage (i.e. NAS) (the black one) but looks like you went with the other one.  That then fell off a truck.  That seems NAS-like too so not sure about the ‘Unlike a NAS' comment, other than it appears to have Cloud based options now.  Which most NASs nowadays have anyway.

It appears you're also looking at Synology now which would be my preference all day long - except would be a 2 Bay one.

These devices do hook up to the router - but via RJ45, not USB.  They also can have USB drives attached too and I've never experienced issues accessing them this way either - but for sure you should be using the ‘internal' storage preferentially.