Sonos won't play music from certain folders on NAS drive.

The challenge is that you’re suggesting that some folders work, and others don’t, which rules out a bunch of “system” level stuff.

If this is the case, I’d be looking very carefully at folders permissions, especially since your computer uses a completely different method to access the data than the Sonos system does.

Thank you for replying. What I don’t understand is why it’s been working perfectly for for the last year or so and now it isn’t. Adding the folders back again seemed to temporarily work but now Sonos can not play them again. I’m not too sure what you mean by “permissions.” Can you elaborate please.

Have you been making any edits to your Music Library? Are you using Schedule Music Index Updates? How large is your library? Are the problem tracks not visible or are there errors as you attempt to play the tracks?

And frankly, it’s not unusual for firmware updates to make unannounced changes to things on an NAS. 
 

No edits have been made.

Music Index Updates are scheduled every evening at 10pm.

Library has 24,000+ tracks.

I have folders split into //SynologyBox/music/A-B, //SynologyBox/music/C-D, //SynologyBox/music/E-G etc. Sonos shows folers C-D and L-O as being empty even though there are files of music shown within them in the NAS drive. Two possible solutions would be to copy the folders and rename them and add them back to Sonos. Or add the files to other folders i.e. add all artists ‘C’ to A-B folder and ‘D’ to A-G. Do either of these sound plausible? And firmware is up to date.

If you remove them all but just add the problem folder, is it still the same?

Not tried that, but that’s a good idea. But thinking about it I’m not sure why it would work as I can not see any music within the folder.

It helps eliminate the possibility of the library index bring full.  Although you only have 24k+ files, they could have large or problematic tags that cause issue with the indexing or take you over the track limit.

That sounds logical too. So annoying that it’s not necessarily 65,000 tracks but 65,000 files that are the limit. 

It's not 65000 files either.  Think more of it like an ‘average' track takes up 1 space - but other tracks with more meta data (some classical music tracks have lots of meta data and very long tags/track names) take up more spaces, thus lowering the amount available.

OK. I’m guessing (hoping) there’s some kind of programme that can be run to find, and maybe even shorten, track names? Please God.

There are plenty of Apps that can do this - but confirm if this is the issue first?

If you are not editing the library, there is no need to enable Schedule Music Update. There is some variability during this process that you cannot control. Are there any visible error messages? You can submit a diagnostic and have support check for error messages that are not visible.

If there is an error the indexer will terminate. This can result in some very difficult to pin down issues because you cannot control the order of file processing. The indexer simply asks the NAS for a list of files and processes them sequentially. If there is an error termination, some files will be missing. If the files missing today are your favorites, you’ll notice. Otherwise, you may not notice that file XYZ is missing because the processing order is different today. Tomorrow, some of your previously ‘missing’ favorites might be present.

We don’t have access to the full diagnostics, but you can sort of dig through things and investigate the possibility of an indexer early termination. Go to http://[IP address of a player]:1400/support/review. This will bring up a web page of players. Click on a [player] → Zone Player Info and check the IdxTrk field. This should be blank. If this is not blank, the indexer had an issue while it was working on file XYZ. This is not a fun job because one player will take charge of the process and you don’t know which one this will be. You’ll need to dig through all of the players looking for a non blank field -- that may not exist.

This looks like fun🤣. Useful information. Thank you.

It became noticeable when the majority of my David Bowie albums disappeared. Not a happy man.

If you want to fuss with things, you can exert a little control.

Split your library into segments as you specify the Library folders. For example:

Davie Bowie
Seasonal
Other dreck

The indexer will individually work through these folders. Depending on your Library size and complexity, you could run out of player RAM while executing the indexer on the full library. Breaking the library into segments reduces the RAM footprint while processing a given segment. This trick has worked well for a number of large Library users.

I already have my library split into about 8 folders (A-B, C-D, E-G, H-K etc). I seem to remember splitting them into approximate number of songs, maybe 3,000 per folder. Are you saying it might be useful to split them down further, maybe one letter per folder (A, B, C, D etc) so this may aid the indexing? Am I understanding this correctly?

Just my 2 cents.

I've got my music library (968 GB) on my Western Digital My Cloud Home NAS, with 64,893 songs in 6,360 folders. I rarely do a rescan, only when I've added new music files. No splitting or segmentation of library necessary. My tags are simple: an album of 10 songs gets tagged (by mp3tag) 01.flac 02.flac or 01.mp3 02.mp3 and so on. Other necessary information (artist, album and what have you) in the tags. Never had any problems.

It just goes to show that the Sonos system does what it should do. In my opinion something must have altered your configuration that previously worked just fine. You might consider submitting a diagnostics within 10 minutes after a failed scan.

Is each of these folders listed as a separate entry in your Library setup? If so, I doubt that further splits will help unless your Metadata is grossly large.

You could change the order in your Library setup. If there is a some difficult Metadata causing the fail, You can somewhat locate the tracks by noticing what is missing.

Unfortunately, this approach may not help with Bowie if the rough spot is in A-B.

A diagnostic can pinpoint the file.

So, today I removed the 8 folders which contained my music. Then I added the C-D folder. This is the folder which had no music in it. When I looked in the folder the music was there. I then added all the folders back in and all music was showing. I then updated the music index. And...no music in folder C-D again. 

Anyone got any ideas please?

Yes, submit a diagnostic and post it here.

SSonos support can look at it and tell you what the issue is.  As you add each folder and re-index, does the library gradually increase?  If so, it suggests the library is full if you are able to see the missing data when everything isn't added.   I don't THINK Sonos adds to the index in any particular order.

Diagnostic number is 841579585.

Further update. I have removed folder C-D and added it back in. All the songs are there. Going forward I will switch off scheduled updates and only upate when I add new music. Not ideal but it’s a work around.

How long will it take for Sonos to look and respond to the diagnostic submitted?

To get Sonos to look at a diagnostic, you will need to contact them direct, not all posts are seen here by Staff and they do not randomly look at every diagnostic report submitted. You can contact them here with your reference number:

https://support.sonos.com/s/contact

Hope that assists you to get your issue resolved. 

Personally, I’ve never seen any value in Schedule Music Update. I’d like to update, check things, and possibly listen to the new rips immediately while I’m ripping more tracks. I tend to rip in large batches, using multiple computers. Discovering an issue the next day, after I’ve put everything away, is a drag.

The initial index run is the most time consuming because every track must be processed. Subsequent runs check the file timestamp and only process recently changed or added tracks.

That’s useful information. As I said I will update like this in the future.