fragmented compilation albums

If you have a PC, or Mac, with the Sonos Controller installed, goto the library settings and change the ‘Group Albums’ option to Album Artists and (if necessary) in the Album Artist track tag/metadata enter ‘Various Artists’ for each of your songs. Make sure you re-index the library in the Sonos App …and that should then resolve the issue.🤞

See below screenshot from the PC controller App.

Hope that works for you.

Hi Ken, many thanks for the response but unfortunately it did not work for me. You mention changing meta data. I had e just spent nearly an hour on then phone with Sonos who basically told me its was “out of scope” for them to help me and I had to change then meta data but I have no idea how to do that.

Is there a tool for that and how do I know what not change?

Regards,

James

Any tag editor will do - examples are mp3Tag, or iTunes, or Windows explorer (file properties) - it’s clearly outside of the Sonos Support remit to make such changes. My own choice would be to use the mp3Tag App.

Hi Ken 

many thanks for your reply. Finally I have sussed out the tags and mp3tag has been easy to use and works and has the desired effect on Sonos grouping etc

Surely it not much for sonos to put some basic guide on how sonos and tags work together. They is a section on tags but its more for developers.

regards

james

If you do change the meta data tags to various artists for compilation albums then do be aware that the artist will no longer appear in the artist view and search may no longer pick up the individual track artist either.
 

the artist will still appear if you have other albums by that same artist but their contribution to the compilation album will be missing.

I am stunned that Sonos know that the fragmented compilation albums is an issue, that they have rejected rolling back the change that created the problem and that they have not posted an official statement on how they see it being fixed.  
they tell you that meta tagging is the issue but don’t mention that it wasn’t a problem previously nor do they officially state that they now expect us all to modify the tags on all our compilation albums. I can see why they wouldn’t want to say that , it doesn’t look that good.

 Nor have I seen any mention, other than in this forum, of the other problems changing the album artist tag to ‘various artists’ causes.   
 

An infuriating situation..

This is not my experience - I can search/find a compilation album Artist via the Sonos App, even if there are no other albums by that artist, as their name is contained in the ‘Artist’ field, even though the ‘Album Artist’ field is set to ‘Various Artists’.

It works fine for my local library.

I did say “may” as the behavior of search depends on which controller you use but in my experience none of them show the artist or track in the  Artist view ,  do you see the artist and track in your artist view?

thinking a bit deeper on this it may also depend on whether you use wav or flac or similar. Most of my library is wav but I am experimenting with converting them to flac.   What format is your library in?

You mentioned ’search’ initially and in my iOS and Android Sonos controllers, if I search for the artist that has a track on a compilation album (only) and no other albums in my library, then the search result finds that artist and their track on the compilation album. The artist view should show you album and tracks under ’various artists’ but you can still find the actual track/artist by using the search facility, or the compilation album etc.

I spent yesterday converting all my compilation albums to FLAC format and found it made no difference to my observations that the individual artists do not show up with their compilation album track in the Artist View.  They are either missing or the artist will appear if you have other albums by that artist but it wont list the compilation track. 

Why would changing the encoding type change the meta data tags?

The WAV format is known to be problematic in its handling of tags. I read that FLAC has more of a standard approach to tags and was trying that approach.  

The compilation ‘artists’ will not show in the ‘Artist’ area of the library because the selection is to group by ‘Album Artists’ - you’ll find the tracks get moved to ‘Various Artists’ or whatever text you put in the ‘Album Artists’ tag/field but you should find you can use the Sonos search facility to find the individual artist with a track on a compilation album.

You can of course change the Sonos library index too by selecting the other option “do not group compilations” but you will only fragment the albums - but you will then see all artists, if that’s what you prefer, although it’s not a view i like to use, personally speaking.

Sonos should make this easy for the customer. If one chooses iTunes compilation, then the album listing should look like iTunes, unfragmented, with all the artist data intact.  Period.  The albums should simply be grouped by album name, not by album artist or track artist. That would solve the fragmentation problem,  The Sonos app used to work that way, so it can’t be too hard to adjust it to work that way again.  it is very anti-customer and very arrogant of Sonos to expect the users to expand hours and hours on their music libraries, changing the original album data, to get it to work.  And by the way, changing all album artists to various artists does not defragment the album. The only way to defragment the album is to also change the track artist to various artists, destroying the most important data of the album.  if Sonos wants to change its image after its software disaster, maybe you should do it by repairing the software.   Disappointing, disappointing, disappointing, Sonos still doesn’t get it.  

I hope someone at Sonos is actually listening. Change your software so that the albums are grouped by album name, and that tracks with the same album name are shown as a single album, without fragmentation. Since the whole marketing focus of Sonos was customer ease and plug and play, Sonos should actually make the software work.   You know, by definition, requiring customers to spend hours manipulating individual data items to get the software to work is not customer, friendly or plug and play.   It’s just bad.  

It shouldn’t take you (personally) ‘hours’, just a few minutes to put wheels in motion to change the one tag field of each ‘compilation’ track - I just set MP3Tag to change all the compilation album artists field to ‘Various Artists’ and walked away - the software did the rest and it was soon resolved.

I just had to reindex the local library (after completion) to resolve the display issue in the App, but again that scan can be started and the indexing will continue without any further user involvement.

The cost to the end-user in terms of time this takes is quite small, comparatively speaking. You don’t have to sit there and wait until the tags are updated, or the library has been re-indexed.

So customers need to obtain and learn to use a third-party piece of software, for Sonos to properly show our libraries?  And then have this software erase and substitute all the original data in an artist field, irreversibly?  Rather than all that imposition in the users - and since the third party software shows it can be done - why doesn’t Sonos simply adapt its own software, to ignore the album artist field, and correctly show the albums, unfragmented?  If the album artist field has to all be changed to an identical “Various Artists” tag, that means essentially that the field is being removed from Sonos’ consideration when determining how to list the album.  So —- just tell Sonos software to ignore the field, rather than have users do Sonos’ work for it.