Sonos / HDX Library Issue

Unfortunately it's a compatibility thing.

If the HDX is set to rip .wav files, it doesn't tag them with metadata but simply stores the metadata and artwork in the same folder.  It's a Naim proprietary method that the HDX can recognise but Sonos cannot.

If your ripped files are in .wav format and you want to keep them that way, you need to tag them in a way that Sonos will recognise.  You also need to ensure that your artwork is stored in the same folder in .jpg format and named folder.jpg as Sonos will not see it otherwise.  You can do both jobs with a number of different programs.  MediaMonkey or dBPoweramp are two that I know well and of these two I find dBPoweramp to be the better because it allows you to tag albums and tracks with accented letters in the title - MediaMonkey will not.  On the other hand, MediaMonkey has a useful "tag from filrname" function which will do a lot of the work for each album automatically, so it has a lot going for it (and it's free) if you're not worried about accented names.

Unfortunately all this tagging has to be done one album at a time.  There is no way to batch it so it's very time-consuming. 

The better alternative may be to configure the HDX to rip to .flac format, and to convert your existing rips to .flac.  This was not a possibility when I encountered the same problem two or three years ago and I had re-tag everything the hard way as described above.  I think that ripping to .flac (which is easier to tag) may allow Sonos to see the ripped files without any further work required but I suggest that you experiment with a couple of albums before committing to this approach.

There has indeed been a recent firmware change for the HDX, to 1.7b. You will now if you have this because you would have burnt a CD and updated the player within the last few weeks. If you have not done that, you will be on the 1.7 version.

Interestingly, the HDX will always rip to WAV. If you set it to rip to FLAC, it rips to WAV and then does the conversion, which takes a few minutes once the ripping is complete.

I converted my whole library to FLAC. There are two advantages - it takes up less space, and if your HDX conks out, you will have FLAC copies on your backup, which are see-able by other devices.

Once converted to FLAC, you can set the HDX to transcode to WAV on playback, which should sound better - I can certainly hear the difference. You need to use the 'decode' option in the desktop client to activate this.

If you were to ask 'should I therefore convert my files to FLAC?', I'd say 'yes', for the reasons stated.

Thanks team.  I'll try the FLAC thing and report back for closure.

As I say, I wouldn't mind if it hadn't worked perfectly before!

So … comically my HDX is on version 1.6b.  I burned the 1.6d update file onto three different blank discs (two CD-R, one CD-RW) but the HDX rejected all three.  So as of now, I can use iTunes to pipe music round the house (it's only really compilations which aren't on Spotify) and the Naim to listen properly in the study.  Which I'm not totally unhappy with actually.  I will drop the HDX into a dealer to let them have a crack at updating the firmware in the new year ...