Hello.

As described here:

and here:

I faced troubles since last year to make use of my local library stored on an external drive connected to my Mac OS Mojave iTunes (not Apple Music) server. I followed all available hints to no avail. Sonos S2 stopped indexing my local library although the external drive was configured as “NAS” or “networked drive”. The indexing progress stopped after 20 up to 40 minutes moaning about the drive “not being available anymore” - although exactly this volume still was available to my complete home network.

I followed many hints stored in this community and also external hints, had a very long and very useless phone call to Sonos and ended up with mail support only providing the same help documents that also were stored in here but were not of any use. The Sonos support was a complete waste of time.

Nevertheless I found some sort of solution myself. Using an old QNAP NAS (and several other configurations and devices...) gave me a the hint for a possible (and meanwhile tested and working) solution. That old NAS only accepted drives formatted as “ExFAT”. It was detected by Sonos and the indexing process worked as supposed. Before using that NAS I changed many network and user rights configurations as mentioned by Sonos and others - also to no avail. The time I fiddled around with that QNAP NAS I was using exactly the same network configuration as I used for many years before that fatal update where SMB1 was killed. Guess what: Everything worked as expected. Conclusion: All this had nothing to do with my network configuration in → any ← way. So the reason for Sonos S2 to moan about the “not being available volume” must be burried elsewhere within the desktop app.

Although it appeared somewhat “irrelevant” to me I started thinking about the file system of the external volume I used for many years without any troubles. Before the Sonos desktop app never had any troubles to deal with that drive formatted as “HFS extended (journaled)”, one of Apple’s file systems. For many years I was able to use the iTunes XML export files for plying my iTunes music library to all of my Sonos speakers, stored on that external drive connected to my Mojave server.

Before the fatal update there already was one update that invoked that “913” error. Sonos tends to handle this error as network related thing but personally I think it is something more, maybe something completely different. Before that 913 error Sonos handled my library directly from that drive. To be more exact: Until that 913 error that drive was NOT configured as NAS or networked drive in any way. After the 913 error I still could use my library as usual but I had to configure exactly that drive as “NAS” or “networked” drive. And then came the killing of SMB1…

Thinking about all these quirks led me to an experiment: Using drives with other file systems as HFS. So I tried:

• the regular HFS extendend ) without “journaled”
• and AFPS

Both filesystems with GUID or master boot record just to be sure. Guess what: The Sonos S2 Desktop app again moaned about that drive not being available anymore during the indexing progress.

So I took a new drive (this time an SSD, later on a standard USB hard disk) and formatted it as ExFAT, copied all my music to that and configured it as networked drive using the very old network settings and user rights that once worked before all these fatal Sonos updates.

It worked!

So my conclusion is that Sonos also changed something at least within the desktop app that is dealing with file systems, to be more exact: Silently dropping support for Apple file systems.

Right now Sonos S2 is re-indexing my complete library but now I have to go another way. As all these files are stored on a new drive and Sonos is not connected to iTunes anymore so my good old playlists are more or less gone. So right now i am using “Apple Music” on my main M1 Mac mini to rebuild everything new from the ground up. The music files themselves are not of a bigger problem. But dealing with quite a large bunch of music files and playlists I am now using an Apple script which more or less works flawlessly even within Mac OS Sequoia and Apple Music instead of iTunes:

https://github.com/Lederhaut/Export-Apple-Music-Playlists/blob/main/ExportPlaylists.applescript

What does this script do:

It exports all the music files related to a playlist AND the according playlist itself to a folder of Your own choice. You can configure the file names the way You like. I copied the resulting folder, the m3u playlist and the music files stored within a sub folder to that new ExFAT formatted SSD connected to my Mac OS Mojave Intel Mac Mini server. Sonos S2 ist not only able to re-index everything to the very end again it also accepts the m3u playlist without any troubles.

You may ask why I did not use my old drive and re-formatted it as ExFAT, too. The answer is simple. That drive is 32 TB of size - and I do not have that much spare space somewhere else to copy all my music and video files over to somewhere else. So now iTunes is serving solely my video files to my Apple TV 4k devices (like it did without any Sonos-like troubles for many years by now) while Sonos now has it’s own dedicated music drive.

Maybe some info in this post might be helpful for other Mac, iTunes and Apple Music users.

Thanks for reading and to Sonos: Thanks for nothing!

Jens