Like many users, we use Sonos in two different houses. We have two NAS's of music that I'm planning on keeping synchronized with RSYNC. What doesn't sync or cant get exported are Sonos Playlists. It would be great to be able to ad-hoc export them and then to import them as well. Using the UPnP interface, I've noted a Java program that can export playlists, but importing them is a bit troublesome. It would be great to have this feature.
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It's a good call and I intend looking into it , but it's not everyone who wants to reorganise the back end of their media set up to safeguard their playlists, when an option built into the Sonos software would be straightforward. 'Save/import your playlists'
Hello Selzhanik,
can we work on it together?
I can find the Sonos-Playlists in MediaMonkey under Medienserver/Saved Queues
This I can export with Strg+E in an m3u file.
In Excel I delete duplicates, save it as a .txt file and then rename it to m3u.
But the list has entries like:
npsdy:Tra.54658904.mp3.
all other lines start with
x-file-cifs://
This list I cannot open with any player. Can you give me a hint?
Regards
Frank
can we work on it together?
I can find the Sonos-Playlists in MediaMonkey under Medienserver/Saved Queues
This I can export with Strg+E in an m3u file.
In Excel I delete duplicates, save it as a .txt file and then rename it to m3u.
But the list has entries like:
npsdy:Tra.54658904.mp3.
all other lines start with
x-file-cifs://
This list I cannot open with any player. Can you give me a hint?
Regards
Frank
So what you're having trouble with is the "I had to use a text editor from there to do some formatting cleanup". Depending on your technical expertise, this could be obvious or complicated.
This process is going to differ based on what kind of operating system you have, media player that needs to read the playlist, and so on. I have a Windows Home Server 2011 most of the music is stored on, a Windows 7 desktop and I'm using many different media players throughout the house (though WinAmp and iTunes most often). So your mileage may vary. I used Scintilla Text Editor to edit the m3u file (I use SciTE for all kinds of things on a daily basis).
The first thing I had to do was find all of the XML-unfriendly characters that had been replaced by "%XX" and change them back into the actual characters. The most common replacement was the space character. I replaced every "%20" with a single space (" "). After that was the ampersand -- replaced every "%26" with "&". Then I simply searched the file for all other "%" characters and made the other edits *. I used a simple ASCII table (see http://www.ascii-code.com/ as an example) when I didn't know the codes already.
* One thing I would note (and I had only one instance of this): UTF-8 characters. They show up as consecutive codes, like "%xx%xx". My example was "\\HOMESERVER\Music\Local\Salvador\Salvador\05 - La Monta%c3%f1a.flac" which I changed to "\\HOMESERVER\Music\Local\Salvador\Salvador\05 - La Montaña.flac". The actual file name has a single lowercase n with a tilde ("ñ"). I did not need to replace the "ñ" with "ñ" to get my playlist to work. I suppose if I did, I'd probably need to name the file with an m3u8 extension (I possibly should have anyway). For more info on these codes, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8.
The second thing I had to do was for every line that started with "x-file-cifs://" (which was EVERY line my particular playlists) I had to convert remove the "x-file-cifs:" and replace each / with \. Thus, my entry "x-file-cifs://HOMESERVER/Music/Local/Pearl Jam/Backspacer/03 - The Fixer.flac" became "\\HOMESERVER\Music\Local\Pearl Jam\Backspacer\03 - The Fixer.flac".
The third thing I had to do was replace each colon that was left with a semi-colon. It appears the Sonos replaces ";" with ":" in their behind-the-scenes listings. I searched for ":" and replaced with ";". An example is "\\HOMESERVER\Music\Local\Yes\Highlights: The Very Best of Yes\04 - I've Seen All Good People: Your Move-All Good People.flac" going to "\\HOMESERVER\Music\Local\Yes\Highlights; The Very Best of Yes\04 - I've Seen All Good People; Your Move-All Good People.flac"
And after all that, my playlist worked in WinAmp and iTunes.
This process is going to differ based on what kind of operating system you have, media player that needs to read the playlist, and so on. I have a Windows Home Server 2011 most of the music is stored on, a Windows 7 desktop and I'm using many different media players throughout the house (though WinAmp and iTunes most often). So your mileage may vary. I used Scintilla Text Editor to edit the m3u file (I use SciTE for all kinds of things on a daily basis).
The first thing I had to do was find all of the XML-unfriendly characters that had been replaced by "%XX" and change them back into the actual characters. The most common replacement was the space character. I replaced every "%20" with a single space (" "). After that was the ampersand -- replaced every "%26" with "&". Then I simply searched the file for all other "%" characters and made the other edits *. I used a simple ASCII table (see http://www.ascii-code.com/ as an example) when I didn't know the codes already.
* One thing I would note (and I had only one instance of this): UTF-8 characters. They show up as consecutive codes, like "%xx%xx". My example was "\\HOMESERVER\Music\Local\Salvador\Salvador\05 - La Monta%c3%f1a.flac" which I changed to "\\HOMESERVER\Music\Local\Salvador\Salvador\05 - La Montaña.flac". The actual file name has a single lowercase n with a tilde ("ñ"). I did not need to replace the "ñ" with "ñ" to get my playlist to work. I suppose if I did, I'd probably need to name the file with an m3u8 extension (I possibly should have anyway). For more info on these codes, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8.
The second thing I had to do was for every line that started with "x-file-cifs://" (which was EVERY line my particular playlists) I had to convert remove the "x-file-cifs:" and replace each / with \. Thus, my entry "x-file-cifs://HOMESERVER/Music/Local/Pearl Jam/Backspacer/03 - The Fixer.flac" became "\\HOMESERVER\Music\Local\Pearl Jam\Backspacer\03 - The Fixer.flac".
The third thing I had to do was replace each colon that was left with a semi-colon. It appears the Sonos replaces ";" with ":" in their behind-the-scenes listings. I searched for ":" and replaced with ";". An example is "\\HOMESERVER\Music\Local\Yes\Highlights: The Very Best of Yes\04 - I've Seen All Good People: Your Move-All Good People.flac" going to "\\HOMESERVER\Music\Local\Yes\Highlights; The Very Best of Yes\04 - I've Seen All Good People; Your Move-All Good People.flac"
And after all that, my playlist worked in WinAmp and iTunes.
Chris Glynn - what do you mean by "and offering people the opportunity to help improve it"? If I had the opportunity to contribute to the Sonos code-base, I'd probably do so... Did they open-source it somewhere?
This is a good workaround and it helps for some problems. Not for importing the play list again though.
Sonos users can take part in Beta testing and share their experiences from using software over different platforms. Here's a link to an example: http://www.sonos.com/mobile/newcontrollerapp Of course, most of the back-end work is done and dusted but it's an opportunity to have some input.
Agreed. I'm certainly a geek who puts way too much time into organizing the back-end of my media collection. And I would very much like to have this feature. Editing the exported playlist is a "trivial" task for *me* and I would rather have it automated. Especially considering I'll probably hit a snag in the future that I haven't anticipated. For someone like my parents (who have a Sonos system too), I doubt they'd attempt this.
I will say though that given the way I seen that Sonos must be storing their playlists behind-the-scenes, and how the libraries are linked to the systems, I very much understand that this is not a trivial feature that Sonos would need to implement. They've obviously implemented their own innovative playlist format that allows for collections on services like Amazon Cloud Player to be placed into the same playlists as files from a local file server or NAS. That's no trivial thing, and there is no "standard" playlist format that they could export to that would cover all those options.
Still, I think Sonos should implement three options: 1) Backup Sonos Playlist -- Backs up the full playlist to a file, and should the system ever completely die... 2) Restore Sonos Playlist -- Restores a Sonos playlist from that proprietary file, which would only work if the replacement Sonos system were set up exactly the same way, with access to the same accounts; and finally 3) Export Sonos Playlist to m3u8 -- Exports all local-network-library entries to a valid .m3u8 file, which could be utilized by other media players on the same network as the Sonos or imported into other Sonos systems.
It's very possible they could decide to implement #1 and #2 as a "Backup / Restore Entire Sonos System Configuration" feature, that backed up all playlists and configuration options at once, which frankly would be much more useful to 50% of the people on this thread. But that wouldn't cover the rest of us who want exported m3u8 files.
Bravo for taking things further than anyone else! The question I have is how many people would be comfortable editing even basic code like this?
Yeah, not many. Like I said in the other comment from you later in the thread, this is not a reason for Sonos to not implement the feature request, but instead something that some DIY / techie people can do in the mean time while we wait.
Yeah, I'm in the beta program... I was hoping I could download some SDK and code up some of my own new features. 🙂
Agreed 100% - something should be done, and as you said in your other response, the way Sonos have knitted together other sources so effectively is impressive and probably at the route of the problem - that's a lot to back-up for a busy user profile. Full of admiration for your efforts - I work with a so-called 'geek', whose ability to think his way around exactly this type of project never fails to impress me (and on occasion, he gets me out of the sh*t 😉
Good call Mr Selzhanik
😃 I'm not sure many similar businesses offer anything like the Beta programme and it's good fun to be part of; I'm about to buy my second Play 5 regardless - more music in more places and really looking forward to trying out some stereo pairing. Think I shall have to stick with with my good ole Spotify playlists until further notice...
Selzhanik,
thank you very much.
With your hint I am able to open the modified Playlist now.
With some exceptions (lines icluding ¿ ü ' ) every song can be played from my playlist now. I still work on it.
Long time ago i wrote short progs in visual basic. This may be a way to translate all ascii signs in one step?
Perhaps you have an Idea?
Frank
thank you very much.
With your hint I am able to open the modified Playlist now.
With some exceptions (lines icluding ¿ ü ' ) every song can be played from my playlist now. I still work on it.
Long time ago i wrote short progs in visual basic. This may be a way to translate all ascii signs in one step?
Perhaps you have an Idea?
Frank
There has been a lot of discussion around this and as you have found out, there is no way of exporting playlists out of your Sonos system either to do what you want to do which is use those self same carefully crafted playlist on another device or back up you playlists in the event a Sonos failure or upgrade which wipes them from your bridge.
Some clever individuals out there have indicated that you can use Media monkey, http://www.mediamonkey.com/ to export your playlists from Sonos. I haven't tried this yet but I understand that you will need to do some work on the exported files to get the into a form which other devices can use.
Search this forum for Media monkey to see what others have said.
Rob
Some clever individuals out there have indicated that you can use Media monkey, http://www.mediamonkey.com/ to export your playlists from Sonos. I haven't tried this yet but I understand that you will need to do some work on the exported files to get the into a form which other devices can use.
Search this forum for Media monkey to see what others have said.
Rob
Guys, forget about Sonos playlists. If you create a new iTunes library (press alt + click on iTunes logo on mac), you can add your music in there, add playlists and as long as the library is accessible via a shared folder to Sonos, it will take the playlists from there and put them into "Imported Playlists" and it will update them. That way, you use iTune to manage your playlists, export them...etc.
Nice idea Galder but doesn't comprehensively solve the problem. Some of us create Sonos playlists on the fly that we want to save (without recreating them in iTunes) plus if you're also using songs from Napster, Spotify etc., they can't be incorporated into the iTunes playlist. SONOS - how long are you going to take to resolve this seemingly basic yet highly irritating problem?! It's letting a truly wonderful product down...
Good point, in my case my playlists are limited to the music I own and hence iTunes offers me 1-to-1 mapping to what I need from Sonos playlists.
I totally agree with user 309843,
I don't want to use iTunes
I don't want to use iTunes
Sonos, please add some basic Playlist manipulation functionality that even freebies have, like Import, Export and Backup. Don't know about the Windows side of things, but on the Mac Controller a right click Reveal in Finder option on tracks would come in very handy too.
Thank you very much for the great sounding hardware with your system, however those missing options are somewhat spoiling the fun.
Thank you very much for the great sounding hardware with your system, however those missing options are somewhat spoiling the fun.
I contacted Sonos customer support on this issue. In reply I received a link to this thread. So, Sonos, I eagerly add my voice here, to. Please add the feature.
Adding my voice to request some way to export a Sonos playlist. Even though I'm using Rhadsody within Sonos, there is no way to even add a playing song to a Rhapsody playlist. Apart from this, have been very happy with Sonos.
I promised copies of playlists I made for our wedding to my friends for use in their wedding. I had to export it using many screen copies and cropping unnecessary info from each picture. It should be possible to at least export the list contents as a text file, preferably a CSV file with separate fields. But backup and restore are needed functions that should be possible for all.
Huge thanks, Selzhanik. I moved my entire music library to a new PC, which broke all of the playlists. Using the free version of Media Monkey and your instructions above, I had updated my playlists in a few minutes (I used PSPad for editing and search & replace). I then imported the playlists back into Sonos. You can then make them back into Sonos playlists (one by one) by finding the playlist under imported playlists, replacing the queue with that playlist, then editing the queue and saving as a new Sonos playlist.
Anyone else having problems with playlists should try this. I'm technical, but it really is quite quick & easy.
This is very poor from Sonos, though. Do they not think that people might need to move files to a new machine or NAS?
Anyone else having problems with playlists should try this. I'm technical, but it really is quite quick & easy.
This is very poor from Sonos, though. Do they not think that people might need to move files to a new machine or NAS?
Glad you got it sorted out Andrew.
When you change out your music library, your Sonos playlists should still work as long as those tracks are available on the new location. You have to go to Manage Music Library and remove the old location, then add the new one. Sometimes, you have to load the playlist back to your queue and save it again to make sure the new paths get loaded.
When you change out your music library, your Sonos playlists should still work as long as those tracks are available on the new location. You have to go to Manage Music Library and remove the old location, then add the new one. Sometimes, you have to load the playlist back to your queue and save it again to make sure the new paths get loaded.
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