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How to show length of songs in WIndows Sonos app?

  • 17 February 2019
  • 7 replies
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The Windows Sonos app doesn't seem to show the length of songs either in the queue or the library. I can't find anywhere in the options or settings to enable that either. How can that be shown? Sometimes it is highly relevant to choosing which cut(s) I want to play.
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Best answer by Alan_6 17 February 2019, 11:41

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Userlevel 5
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To efficiently use the limited memory (and maybe also to keep the UI "clean" and uncluttered) Sonos stores and displays the absolute minimum number of tags for each track. Your Sonos system probably doesn't know how long an individual track is until it starts playing. This is why you can't (and probably won't ever) see either individual track lengths or album running times.

So if, say, you have 35 minutes to kill and want to stick on a short album, you'll need to rely on a different music app like iTunes to tell you how longs things are.
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Alan_6 is correct: the database does not contain any length information for tracks.
I agree that not showing the length of each cut keeps the UI simple and clean, and that is needed especially on a small display such as phone or small tablet. But there should be an option to show this, since it is relevant to how some people play songs or choose which cuts to play (such as when I want a 20 or 30 minute track from an artist, not a 3 or 10 minute track).

Memory is not a limitation. This is just a few more bytes per track in the Sonos library, and terabytes of disk space are almost typical on house NAS servers.

The player app has access to online databases and the song metadata would include the track length and can be obtained from those music info databases. MediaMonkey as an example lists the length of each track. Sonos does know and show the track length, when it's playing.

The info is in there, so it would be nice to have a user preference option to show this in both the queue and the library views.

I don't think I like the workaround of using iTunes to check the length of songs before choosing what to play on my Sonos, though 😉
Heh. You obviously haven't read the many threads decrying the 65K(ish) limit of library size on these forums. Every "few more bytes per track" would reduce that already decried limitation.
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Memory is not a limitation. This is just a few more bytes per track in the Sonos library, and terabytes of disk space are almost typical on house NAS servers.


By my estimation, I'm using over half my available Sonos memory with my library. I'm not sure I'd like to eat into the remainder on an extra tag per song. NAS space, on the other hand, is a non-issue as the files used to feed your local library can already reveal their track length. But again, see all the other threads on memory limits.

What would be awesome is for Sonos to extend the "reading more info about the current selection from tags at run-time" from artwork into other tags not already cached in memory, so that the UI could display more (imagine if the "info" screen gave you actual info). But I don't really expect that to happen.
Airgetlam - I hadn't heard of the 65K limit! That takes me back in time - to 16 bit computers. Now I see where the problem is.

Alan_6 - that would be a solution, pull in that data when needed but not keep it in the 65K library file.
Well, Sonos' software still supports their earliest hardware, and since that's where all the work is done, any effort is likely restricted by how much available memory and CPU they were able to get in those original speakers.