Recent Sonos update is broken on non-ASCII characters in file names

I made a test and changed the settings for the music library, so that I removed the share for the playlists on the NAS, and instead I mapped the music library to read the playlists from my Windows machine. This changed things to the better, so that file names now appears correctly in the Sonos app, and the files on the playlists are visible.

So it appears that this is only an issue when reading files from Linux, or possibly certainly flavours of Linux.

While this is a workaround for me, I still prefer to have everything on the NAS, which has a higher uptime than the Windows machine.

<Rampant speculation> so the SL has a different SMB stack than every other device? Perhaps it is a sign of a “modern” SMB implementation that will eventually support SMBv2 or v3? </RampantSpeculation>

This is not strictly true, but more humorous than the standard “nothing to share” response. 

What codepage are your playlists in? Is there a BOM on it? Was there a Synology update recently (I ask because I’d be surprised if Sonos changed something as frozen-in-time as imported playlists).

It is equally broken if your NAS share is a Windows Server 2019 box.

FYI from debugging what filename the One SL is requesting, my guess is that it is scanning/indexing correctly in UTF-8 but sending the encoded name request as (I’m guessing) ANSI, which the fileserver perfectly reasonably cannot then find.

The work around is to start music on another (non-SL) speaker and bring the SLs into that group. The other speaker will be group leader and will request the correct filenames. You can then zero the volume on that speaker, leaving the SLs playing the music as desired but within that group.

I've experienced the same issue where the artists and albums containing non-English characters e.g. Scandinavian we're not appearing in my music library, despite having been visible previously.  After lots of testing I can confirm that the issue has nothing to do with my Synology NAS and relates to Sonos systems where the Associated Product is a One SL.

I have 2x One SL in my system and one of these was my Associated Product. Each time I updated the music library I had lots of missing artists & their albums from artists such as Trentemøller.

After some testing, the following work around resolved the issue for me:

1. I powered off both One SL and restarted the Sonos Controller which forced a change to the Associated Product.

2. I then powered on both One SLs and manually updated my music library and the missing Artists and albums reappeared.

It is disappointing that this issue has been known about for a couple of months and Sonos have not yet provided a fix. Hopefully a fix will be provided very shortly.

I have contacted Sonos to ask them to let me know when this issue will be fixed or to arrange to replace my One SLs with Ones.

I hope this helps others in the short term and that Sonos provide a long-term fix.

I called Sonos support to report the issue, but lo and behold: they had a solution! In my NAS (a Synology DS213), I was told to go to the Control Panel, and then select File Services. There is a tab SMB/AFP/NFS. In this tab, select Advanced. In this UI there is “Max SMB-protocol” and “Min SMB-protocol”. They should be set to SMB2 and SMB1 respectively. I applied these changes and restored the setting for the music library to use the NAS for the playlists - and now things are working properly. Well, almost. Folder names with non-ASCII names are still broken, but that is less of an issue, since I don’t use folders that much, and it is still possible to get to the tracks.

Hats off for Sonos Support!

The playlist is generated by a bash script under Linux: it basically finds all the FLAC-files in a folder (including subfolders), lists them, then shuffles the list, and picks the first 250. The result is saved to a file, prefixed with the URL to the server and share. This effectively creates a playlist with 250 random pieces.

The file is in UTF-8 format. I can try to add a BOM, but (I can’t remember) I may have tried this already.

The problem is “fixed” when I convert the file from UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1 (“Latin-1”) after saving, but this often fails if the files contain an accented letter that has no equivalent in the extended ASCII set.

I’m thinking of adapting this script, listing all the FLAC’s I have and running it through “grep”, which can highlight non-ascii characters for me. Then I can remove those letters and for example replace “ü” with “ue”, etc, like is often done in Germany.

After the update that came a few days I go, I don’t see this problem. Hopefully, this means that the issue has been fixed. But since it was only Sonos One SL that was affected, and I got a few more other players, it could also be that the scheduled updated moved to a different player after the installation of the new version.

I applied an update to Sonos yesterday. It was over a month since I last applied an update to the NAS.

I believe the NAS is running Linux, so I would expect file names to be in UTF-8. I would not expect there to be BOMs in the file names. (The playlists are actually created on a Windows system, and then copied to the NAS. Thus, the names are originally in UTF-16LE, but that is not a concern to Sonos, as Sonos does not know about the Windows system. And, yes, I did check the names on the NAS before I made my post.)

The issue is not isolated to Playlists, but names are broken when I check the Folders node as well. In fact, here is also some extra confusion, because some artists with non-ASCII characters appear multiple times.

So it seems to be a general problem in how file names are read and stored.

I also have this problem. When will it be fixed?

Now I have gotten two updates to Sonos since this thread - alas the problem is still there. I can work around by requesting a manual update of the music library - for some reason the scheduled one runs on one of the One SL. Too bad for those who only Sonos One SL and no other player.

ok, thanks for communication. We waiting