Music Library Compilation Issue under new 16.3 Firmware

BTW there were two similar threads dealing with this issue. Not sure which one had that advice from Corry or, at this point, where I read anything. It’s all blended together.

Classical tagging is fun!  NOT!!

All.l my.l music already “worked like a charm” until Sonos f***ed it up. It continues to “work like a charm” in my subsonic system. That system is able to understand that the album called “a state of trance - disc 1” is a single album with tracks by multiple artists. Sonos used to be able to work this out too. Nothing that Sonos have said in this topic explains why they are no longer able to do this.

Moderator Note: Modified in accordance with the Community Code of Conduct.

Corry, 

if this is the official position of Sonos and you really do expect everyone to tag their compilation albums to resolve the Album fragmentation issue then can I ask that you at least approach the engineers to get them to resolve the Artist list capability as if you do Tag your albums with “Various Artists” or similar in the “Album Artist” Tag all the individual Artists no longer appear in the Artist List.  I have found the situation to be:

IPAD Version 

    Compilation Artist* appears in Artist List = NO

    Compilation Artist appears in Search = YES 

Android Version 

    Compilation Artist appears in Artist List = NO

    Compilation Artist appears in Search = YES 

Windows PC Version 

    Compilation Artist appears in Artist List = NO

    Compilation Artist appears in Search = NO 

• by “Compilation Artist” I am referring to the Artist tagged on an individual track within a compilation album that has been tagged with Album Artist = |”Various Artists” or similar

which is all very inconsistent and annoying. 

Hi ​@Editor 

Thank you for reporting this, and for laying it out clearly. I have passed this on as requested.

just to clarify a little further:  

In the above scenario the Artist may still appear in the list if your library has other solo albums by the same Artist but the compilation album won’t appear under their name in the list. 

If you don’t have other albums by the Artist then the Artist wont appear in the Artist list at all. 

Jumping in at the end here after reading many threads and hope this one is OK, please guide me elsewhere if needed….

In my case, even after tagging the compilations Album Artist with “Various” (using MediaMonkey) some compilations still did not group (many did). After much searching I found that the problem ones were all .WAV files. Now even though MediaMonkey has a slot for Album Artist for .WAV files, when you look at the file properties in Windows explorer there is no Album Artist category, only Contributing Artist (same as Artist inn Media Monkey). .FLAC etc formats do have both Contributing Artist and Album Artist in Windows properties. e.g.

So, a bit more trial and error and it looks like SONOS can’t group .WAV files by Album Artist because that category doesn't exist for .WAV files (as far as SONOS is concerned) so it appears to default to [Windows]Contributing Artist (which just to confuse things MediaMonkey calls Artist) for compilation album grouping which obviously creates an “album” for each [Windows] Contributing Artist / [MediaMonkey] Artist….

It also seems that the SONOS App uses [SONOS] Artist to refer to [Windows] Album Artist rather than [Windows] Contributing Artist ….

I guess the answer for me is to re-format / re-acquire and re-tag all my .WAV files, at least I’ll get some better quality!

Hope this was helpful to a few people.

cheers

Hi ​@DJK Synology NAS 

I am surprised to hear you are using WAV files - they are traditionally entirely uncompressed, and as so, are a bit of a waste of disk space. They also pre-date PCs being able to reproduce anything but the most basic of audio, so it does not surprise me to hear that the ID3 tags are not working as expected.

I agree/highly recommend that you re-encode all your WAV files as FLAC files - as a lossless codec, the output of a FLAC decoding is exactly what was inputted to the encoder in the first place, i.e. CD quality (or better) audio. I don’t think you will get better audio as a result, but you should have much better luck with the tagging of it, at the least.

I hope this helps.