New to Sonos - A Few Questions

[FHB1]

Greetings Everyone. This is my first post. I've been reading about sonos for quite some time now and it seems like exactly what I've been looking for. Today I decided to take the plunge and I ordered 2X Play:5 and a Bridge. I can't wait for them to arrive! In the meantime, I've been reading as much as I can so that I can hopefully have a smooth setup when my sonos equipment finally arrives.

Before I get to my questions, here is my computer/network setup that I'll be working with:

Macbook OS X 10.6.8, Airport Extreme Base Station, Western Digital My Book 1TB external drive connected to the AEBS via usb cable.

I have two iTunes libraries on my WD hard drive that I currently access wirelessly with my laptop. One of the libraries is over 500GB and contains way too many files for sonos to use. The other library consists of around 8,000 songs of my favorite music. This is the library that I plan to use with sonos.

One question I have is, can I have sonos only access the music from my smaller iTunes library and not have it access music from my larger one, or will sonos automatically try to retrieve all of the music on my external drive? I started getting nervous about this because I read that sonos only reads "root level folders." What exactly is a "root level folder." Do I need to worry about this?

Another question I have is regarding importing my iTunes playlists into sonos. My iTunes .xml and .itl files are located on my laptop and all of the music files are on my external drive (in two separate folders). If I set up sonos to access the music files on my external drive, I am assuming that sonos will not be able to access the .xml and .itl files that are on my computer so that my smart playlists can be added. If I have my iTunes set up this way, will sonos be able to read my smart playlists? I have read about this in the forums, but I haven't found info regarding my particular iTunes setup. I appreciate any help you can give me with this as I really don't want to loose my smart playlists.

Please pardon me if these seem like noobie questions. I'm just very excited for my sonos system to arrive and I'm trying to troubleshoot ahead of time in hopes of a smooth setup. I appreciate any answers that you may be able to provide. Thank you!

[the_lhc]

Originally Posted by FHB1

I have two iTunes libraries on my WD hard drive that I currently access wirelessly with my laptop. One of the libraries is over 500GB and contains way too many files for sonos to use.

How many?

The other library consists of around 8,000 songs of my favorite music. This is the library that I plan to use with sonos.

One question I have is, can I have sonos only access the music from my smaller iTunes library and not have it access music from my larger one, or will sonos automatically try to retrieve all of the music on my external drive? I started getting nervous about this because I read that sonos only reads "root level folders." What exactly is a "root level folder." Do I need to worry about this?

How many network shares do you have setup? If it's just one then yes Sonos will scan the whole lot. To get around this you could share the smaller library by itself (as well as sharing the entire library) and point Sonos at that instead.

Another question I have is regarding importing my iTunes playlists into sonos. My iTunes .xml and .itl files are located on my laptop and all of the music files are on my external drive (in two separate folders). If I set up sonos to access the music files on my external drive, I am assuming that sonos will not be able to access the .xml and .itl files that are on my computer so that my smart playlists can be added. If I have my iTunes set up this way, will sonos be able to read my smart playlists? I have read about this in the forums, but I haven't found info regarding my particular iTunes setup. I appreciate any help you can give me with this as I really don't want to loose my smart playlists.

Sonos can only access playlists that are in the share it's reading. If you move (or copy) the playlists in there it'll find them but they won't necessarily work because they'll be pointing to files in a location relative to the laptop, which Sonos won't understand (because it doesn't know your laptop exists).

[buzz]

FHB1,

Welcome to the forums.

Here is a thread that will help.

The "root" is the highest level folder on the share. For example, if you have a file on your NAS "\\myNAS\\music\Artist_1\Track02.mp3", "music" is the root. In your case you might name your shares "\\myNAS\littleMusic" and "\\myNAS\bigMusic". Up to 16 shares can be included in your SONOS library.

Since you will be bumping into the 65000 track limit, indexing will simply stop at 65000 tracks. Unfortunately, one cannot predict exactly which tracks will be included and successive runs might result in slightly different libraries.

SONOS does not care about the music file size. There are some artwork size considerations.

[FHB1]

Thank you, the_lhc and buzz for you replies.

@ the_lhc - my large iTunes library currently contains 72,310 tracks, so I won't use that one with sonos.

@ buzz - thank you for providing the links, they were very helpful. I think what I may do is purchase a 500GB or 1TB external hard drive that I will exclusively use for sonos and keep it plugged into my Airport Extreme Base Station.

After some more reading, I am under the impression that I should start iTunes with the option key pressed down and start a brand new, blank iTunes library on my computer. Then I should drag the blank library (copy it with all of it's included folders and files) to the new hard drive that I will keep connected to my AEBS. Then, once I have the blank library on my new hard drive that's connected to AEBS, I should drag music I want to play in sonos to it from my old hard drive. Once the music I want is on there, I can create my smart playlists and all of the files that sonos needs to be able to read the playlists will be on the new hard drive that's connected to the AEBS. Would this be a good way to go about setting things up? I really need to use the iTunes smart playlist feature with sonos, because with very large iTunes libraries like the ones I have, it is difficult (to say the least) to manage the music without them. Thanks again for your help!

[Charles A]

I am thus far unable to import any iTunes playlists. I am currently sharing my iTunes media folder and all of my music is accessible. However, none of the playlists are imported. I googled and found step-by-step instructions from sonos about sharing the xml file in itunes which supposedly contains the playlist infomation. However, these instructions appear to be for the older version of itunes before they changed the name of the folder to 'iTunes media". I am assuming that by sharing the iTunes media folder, all the subfolders which should include the xml file should also be shared. What am I doing wrong?

[buzz]

Charles A,

First post! Welcome to the forums.

iTunes is very aggressive about creating playlists. There is a 40000 track limit to iTunes playlists. Check to see if you hit this limit.

Also, you must run the SONOS "Update Music Library Index Now" before any changes to your iTunes playlist lineup will be visible on your SONOS system.