Is Sonos updating my music library?

[jan_buelens]

I keep a master copy of my music library on my PC. What I give to Sonos to play from is a copy on a NAS box. Frequently, when I sync the NAS box with the master copy on my PC, I notice that some of the files on the NAS box have been updated.

So somebody is updating the music library on my NAS box. Nobody on my home network except Sonos knows about my NAS box so it can only be Sonos that is doing the updating. Whoever is doing it seems have gone out to some web based CD database and found additional tags that had been blank in my master copy. Great you might say, somebody is trying to help. Except I don't want this help...

Is there a way to turn this feature off? I don't want anybody to mess with my music library. Two reasons:

1. I want my NAS box to be a reliable backup of my master copy. The integrity of the backup is worth more to me than the additional tags that Sonos(?) finds for me. Anything that I put in my library already has all the tags that I want.

2. Sonos(?) puts back tags that I deleted because I didn't want them. I put a lot of work into sanitising the list of composers as it appears in Sonos desktop. My library is mainly classical so I care about composers. If like me you have a lot of medieval music, the raw data that you get from the CD libraries quickly pollutes your composer list with lots of meaningless (e.g. anonymous, 14th century anon...) or obscure composer names (e.g. people whose entire known repertoire is one or two tracks). I combat that problem by leaving the composer tag blank (and moving the info into the title tag). Sonos(?) thwarts my efforts by putting the composer tag back.

[ratty]

A fundamental tenet of Sonos' operation is that it does not write to your library. Something else is tampering with your files.

[jgatie]

I concur with ratty. Not only is it a basic tenet (one that a lot of owners wish it would break for ratings, last played tags, bookmarking, etc.; but Sonos refuses), I've never seen Sonos write to any of my tracks in 4 years. Something else is amiss.

[andyscott]

A simple way to prevent this is to create a read-only share for Sonos, etc. to use.

That way, whatever is accessing your NAS will not be able to alter the contents.

Obviously it does depend upon your NAS being able to set a share to read-only but I think most can.

[buzz]

jan_buelens,

I'll join the chorus -- SONOS can't write!

Some music manager programs can be very surly and take charge of things.

While I don't know which of your programs is messing with your files, part of your symptoms indicate that you have a classic duplicate file issue.

In case of duplicate files in the SONOS library, the user has no control over which file will be included in the library. If you have a trash folder defined in a NAS share that is part of you music library, disable the trash folder. SONOS will scan every file in the share (including trash), looking for music. Any deleted file will end up in trash and is mostly a duplicate of the real file. This is very confusing to the human because the human can "prove" that the (wrong) file is correct. Note that some tag editors first make a copy of the file before editing, then delete the original and rename the copy. The deleted file will end up in trash -- and SONOS will pick through the trash.

Also note that you should not store a backup copy of your library in the same share that SONOS is using for the library. The backups will be duplicates. Don't attempt to predict which copy will be included in the SONOS library.

[pendlebum]

Hi jan_buelens,

i know this is not related to your problem, but whilst I was reading your post I just wondered what software you were using to duplicate your iTunes library because that's exactly what i think i need to do.

thanks in advance,

Matt