Sonos issues and connectivity

I guess the obvious questions will be what is your NAS drive, and how is the Sonos 5 connected to your network? 

Also what level of controller and speaker firmware are you on? If you have a laptop or PC, have you loaded the desktop controller? It can be a bit more reliable at the moment in seeing and controlling your kit. 

Originally I ran it from my MacBook but now the app is installed on a brand new windows 11 pro pc, can’t see any drives as I did check that. My as drives are both synology using SMB 2.0 again I saw this mentioned as it could help. I can still see and use my drives with my other v1 speakers without a problem. Re connectivity I run everything on a mesh WiFi system. Directly linked into my router and as far as I am aware all speakers are up to date, as I can’t see the app prompting to update any of them.

How many songs are on your NAS shares? 

Access to your NAS is now available with the latest update, but the user interface still needs work. I agree that the desktop controller is better, but there are still some missing features that you had on S1.

A music library can include up to 65.000 files. Normally, this is one track per file. There is no limit to the file size. You could build a library of 65,000 CD’s if each CD was condensed into one file. Of course this structure would make playing a specific track rather tedious.

65000 is a theoretical limit, and it does appear that switching from a PC hosted to NAS uses more metadata space and also the length of the network path seems to have an impact. The new app may also have increased the metadata use too. It’s a potential explanation for some of the strange issues in the absence of anything official. Of course we have no idea how much metadata space we use. 

What’s odd is there are a few instances of Synology NAS drives in the ‘disappearing’ list and they support SMB1-2-3 so even if the new speaker firmware drops 1, it should still be able to access the shares. 

Sorry for the delay in replying, was eating dinner then working out how many files i have :) so my total NAS collection minus the vinyl is sitting at 356 GB and 62292 files. I can still access this from my S1 app without a problem using my older speakers. I have also installed the desktop app and currently adding my library to it. any pointers if this will help with my iphone app? or the issue i have whem using my bluetooth turntable. again both worked prior to the update in May. 

It looks like it’s down the new S2 app rather than the S1 app, as i have mentioned that sees and runs my library without a problem, S2 will happily stream my bandcamp account, but to see anything else i have to use bluetooth. 

Ok installed the desktop app and now my music library is installed and is showing on the app, which in itself is weird, but many thanks for the pointers all. just now need to resolve the streaming from my turntable and all sorted. 

As long as the Roam is on wifi the Bluetooth source should be available across your system. 

I think you may have hit some metadata limit. Don't forget it’s the speakers that index, so your S1 speakers will probably be storing less metadata than S2 speakers use. We know they’ve made changes in the S2 firmware here to support the new app’s search as they broke indexing of compilation albums. 

If you can on the Synology, move a chunk of data off the Sonos share and see if the S2 library suddenly appears. If it does, that would confirm the issue is around that, although if it’s all there in the desktop controller, it again points to some weird issue in the S2 mobile app. I would check from the desktop controller that all tracks seem to be there just incase it’s better at handling an incomplete library. 

At 62k tracks you will be close the S1 limits too, as much depends on overall metadata and how much you add etc. 

A copy of the library file names and SONOS Playlists is stored in each player. All of the controllers could be uninstalled without corrupting the library. (Of course you’d need to re-install a controller before being able to select tracks for play, but correctly selected tracks would continue to play without the controllers.) With short metadata a full 65,000 track library is easy. With long metadata, I’ve seen some users report running out of space in the 30K range.

Some ripping programs use excessive metadata. I’ve seen some that will dump the full first stanza of an opera into the metadata when track file names of 00001.flac through 65000.flac would suffice.

Much older versions of S1 could display the amount of RAM used for library metadata. Currently, this is visible only to SONOS support in the diagnostics.

Well the library has appeared in my S2 app now, so that’s a bonus i will definately take some of the pointers and check if everything is showing that’s on my NAS in the app. many thanks for the all the help and pointers, much appreciated.

Now i need to try and resolve the bluetooth turntable only working with my Roam and not syncing to the new S5, as that’s slightly tedious. 

Not sure what you mean by “sync”. If you’re trying to Bluetooth connect to a Five you’re out of luck as it doesn’t support Bluetooth. Otherwise, select the Roam, get the turntable playing, then group the Five with the Roam. The music the Roam is playing is then sent to the Five too. If you select the Five first, then group the Roam, the Five’s input is selected and the turntable input ceases. 

I appreciate that, as that’s how i have been using the setup, by selecting the turntable, then the Roam, then going into the Sonos S2 app, selecting both speakers then hitting apply, as soon as i do this the music stops playing on the Roam and of course nothing comes out of the S5. 

When Groping Rooms, start with the ROAM, then add the FIVE to the GROUP. FIVE will then play (in sync) anything playing through ROAM.