I have my music stored as flac files. All the hints to stop fragmentation of compilation albums (multiple artists on the one album) point to using id3v2 tags. Flac files do not support id3 tags but rather use vorbis format tagging. Does the Sonos infrastructure support vorbis tagging. I saw that the speakers needed update to support the “Album Artist” (albumartist) tag . For exampleI have “1000 Years of Classical Music” 8 CD set. On Sonos this equates to 74 “albums”. I have a number of albums from Bluesfest. If the album has 18-20 artist Sonos will display it as 18-20 separate albums ?. My Music Library is over 16000 tracks consuming over 450Gb. Uncompressed it is over 800Gb.
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1355 albums, 596 artists, 16704 songs
As you can see the Album artist tag is set in the flac file (It is a vorbis tag ). I have looked at
The android app and the windows app do not seem to honour the tag.
I use MP3Tag to tag all my music, from MP3s to FLACs without issues. It also lets me embed album art. I set up Artist and Album artists too and now my library performs as expected. It’s free so may be worth a try. Back up the library first!
Mp3tag on my windows system does not tag file correctly for Sonos.
On the Sonos system this is lasted as 4 albums (based on Artist).
What I find frustrating is that the Album below is listed as one Album (Various Artists) despite the fact there is multiple artists. I have tagged the above file many different ways but still get the same result. From the image below you can see that the tags are “flac” (Vorbis) and not FLAC,ID3v2. I am about to start looking at the internal tag order to see If I can work out why one works and not the other.
If Sonos people read tis can the let me know if their app (or hardware/software) support Vorbis data.
Tagged file that works with Sonos
Yesterday I added an album (ripped and tagged with picard). When I updated the library it added the new album but did not fix the first album mentioned above. Today I added some songs to an existing Album. The songs were from a Bandcamp flac download. On completion of the “scan for new content” the classical Cd now shows the files all listed correctly under Various Artists. I don’t know why this time it was a success. It was a waxing gibbous moon both days so it must be something else 
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I have discovered that Sonos uses the file timestamp as part of their “need to reread file” logic.
I cleared the “Preserve timestamp of tagged files” in Picard Options->Options and now The “Album Artist” tag is being used correctly.
It is also worth noting that Sonos tag handling does work for flac files.
Musicbrainz Picard as a tagger works also.
Mp3tag has a General Option “Preserve file modification time when saving tags”.
p.s.
Something like using a crc32 on the file would have been a less intrusive (on file time) but at least I have a solution.
Cheers
Interesting to know. That would explain some behaviours I’ve encountered with albums showing twice but with different track but look fine in MP3Tag.
They use more than just timestamp as I tested by “touching” the files. I was probably a bit cheeky suggesting crc32 as it might take a while to check 16000+ plus songs.
%-)
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