Feature Request: Export and Import Sonos Playlists
Userlevel 4
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.
This topic has been closed for further comments. You can use the search bar to find a similar topic, or create a new one by clicking Create Topic at the top of the page.
Page 8 / 9
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.
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
Userlevel 2
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
😃 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...
Good call Mr Selzhanik
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 😉
Yeah, I'm in the beta program... I was hoping I could download some SDK and code up some of my own new features. 🙂
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.
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?
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.
This is a good workaround and it helps for some problems. Not for importing the play list again though.
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?
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.
Userlevel 2
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
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'
Userlevel 2
As selzhanik mentioned, you CAN export sonos playlists. Mediamonkey is free and it can see your sonos playlists just as easily as it can see your music library. Just export them as m3u files to any folder on your computer that you like. You can even set mediamonkey to export them every night as a backup.
I'm with you Douwe! I assume that enabling the saving/export of playlists has some kind of knock-on affect that end-users are missing - it's all guesswork from our point of view isn't it? I lost all of my playlists last year - gutting.
I agree. But that's why it is so odd that there is no official response to this. Most of the time if I have some small thing, customer support is quick and good. And really this doesn't seem like something that hard?
Have to say that Sonos is constantly updating the software, and offering people the opportunity to help improve it, and while I'm 100% behind the basic ability to export playlists, I'm very happy with the kit overall. I've taken to saving playlists to Spotify - not ideal, and I have to pay to do that. It's time we had an answer on this - there's obviously a reason they've not enabled it, maybe copyright? I really don't know... Come in mods - step in and give us a proper response - we know you're listening 😉
Userlevel 2
Medimonkey findet Sonos Playlisten unter Medienserver/Saved Queues. Diese kann ich markieren und mit Strg+E in eine Wiedergabeliste exportieren.
Diese exportierte Liste habe ich dann in Excel geöffnet, absteigend von a-Z sortiert und dann unter Daten die Duplikate entfernt.
Wie bekomme ich sie jetzt wieder in Sonos zurück?
l.G.
Frank
Diese exportierte Liste habe ich dann in Excel geöffnet, absteigend von a-Z sortiert und dann unter Daten die Duplikate entfernt.
Wie bekomme ich sie jetzt wieder in Sonos zurück?
l.G.
Frank
I guess once you've bought into their product line they have no reason to listen to you anymore. Although it does give you incentive to look at other options.
Unbelievable how Sonos can irritate their biggest fans! ... I stopped using sonos playlists all together and use Spotify to manage my playlists ... My biggest irritation is the arrogance of not even explaining why exporting/importing and sorting playlists are not being offered.
For what it's worth, you can connect to the Sonos with Media Monkey (even the free version) and access the playlists. From there you can save the playlist as m3u. I had to use a text editor from there to do some formatting cleanup, but it did work. Also allowed me to see my duplicates in the listing and help organize it better. Makes for a decent solution for exporting from one Sonos to another, or backing up your playlists.
I was just told to add my voice to this conversation. I am switching NAS, I don't want to lose my playlists. Or should I just always make sure to only use Spotify?
Page 8 / 9
Enter your username or e-mail address. We'll send you an e-mail with instructions to reset your password.