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Roughly a little more than a year ago I noticed that select tracks from compilations ignored my metadata and opted to treat them as a single track.

To give more detail. I am an avid music collector and have many albums that are not genuinely a compilation. I have “fixed” metadata to treat the album as a single collection of tracks under a single “artist” name. In some cases these are scores/soundtracks that I wish to keep as the movie title as the “album artist” name and leaving each track as the artist. Also there are times were a guest artist is featured on the artist name where I remove the guest artist and add their name to the track title.

I am one who cares more about keeping the album track integrity over being able to single out an track’s artist. When building playlists by artists, I like to keep a simple and not have to adjust parameters to comb through “artist feat, another artist”; especially when they are merely a guest vocalist on a single track.

All was good, and I was able to sort through the Artist list and everything fell in line with the metadata. Then one day, random one-off artists starting showing up in lieu of the artist name I assigned as the album artist. Checking metadata, nothing to artist, album artist or track name has changed - but the track number has been removed. Fixing it only lasts until the next time I update the library and then the track number is gone again. This then negatively affects playing the album, because it places these tracks last, if it includes them at all in the album track list. When listening to a DJ compilation, all continuity and everything they did to curate the performance is gone.

I am read other posts and questions about this. I have tried changing how the Library handles compilations. Nothing works to get it back to where I had it as the key issue is that I do not want anything handled as a compilation or as “various artists”. I want what I had for well over a decade with my SONOS until whatever update altered it. I am very detailed with my music collection and have worked to make it work for me. I am one who insists upon looking for solo artist by their last name, I don’t like Looking for David Bowie in the Ds ( I worked in a record store for too many years to change that).

So, what happened and how to I get back MY library?

Hi @mad.hugger 

Thanks for your post!

I’m not sure I understand - are you saying that Sonos is removing the track numbers from your tracks’ metadata when you re-index? We never open files as read/write, only as read-only, so I don’t see how this could be the case. I would suspect other software of doing this long before suspecting Sonos, to be honest.

If you think I am incorrect, I recommend you get in touch with our technical support team for some real-time troubleshooting - we would need to see some proof before contemplating taking any action in regards to software changes.

If I have misunderstood, however, please elaborate on what you think is happening. Thanks.

Well, not saying specifically that Sonos changed metadata. What I can clearly say is that the metadata is different from what has been created. I am not sure exactly what is being indexed and what priority is given to which fields. What I can say is that the track in question had a track number, it was somehow - somewhere removed. When corrected and the Sonos library was indexed again, the track number was no longer there - again.

Since that tiny little nugget of detail I provided was your only focus, then you are not really providing help. There are bigger fish to fry than that. That piece is a related nugget to a much bigger issue. Why is the indexing deciding to ignore the metadata as entered and well established for over 10 years. This is not something that has been this way all along, it is something that within the last year or so has caused my library within Sonos to be jumbled and not to what I established and took painstaking effort to format to the way I wish to enjoy my music.

And please tell me what other software would be doing this. This is a CD that I ripped once, over 10 years ago. It is not played regularly, in fact it may go months without being played. There are only 2 means of me to listed to my music - via Sonos in my home, on an iPod when outside my home. The iPod is my only Apple product and I do not let iTunes manage my library or give permissions to edit metadata. I only manually update the iPod when new music is added to my library about 2 times a year as I only use it when camping in the summer. That leads to the likelihood of this being a factor very low. Within hours of fixing the metadata, re-indexing the library, the issue was repeated. So, something with Sonos and how it is handling compilations has changed. Ideas?

Hi @mad.hugger 

Since that tiny little nugget of detail I provided was your only focus, then you are not really providing help.

I’m sorry you feel that way, but there’s not much point in me trying to provide help if I don’t know what the problem is. And, knowing that your Sonos system only ever opens files in a read-only state, I couldn’t make sense of what you described - at least, not in relation to Sonos. Ergo, I asked for clarification.

There are bigger fish to fry than that. That piece is a related nugget to a much bigger issue. Why is the indexing deciding to ignore the metadata as entered and well established for over 10 years. This is not something that has been this way all along, it is something that within the last year or so has caused my library within Sonos to be jumbled and not to what I established and took painstaking effort to format to the way I wish to enjoy my music.

Music Library isn’t something that has seen much change over the last few years, and the changes it has seen all relate to our S2 software, so cannot in any way affect your S1 system. For S1, there have been no changes.

And please tell me what other software would be doing this. This is a CD that I ripped once, over 10 years ago. It is not played regularly, in fact it may go months without being played.

Not only do I not know what software you have installed, I don’t even know what Operating System you’re on or what kind of computer you are using, so I have no idea. It’s certainly not unusual for some music applications to “take ownership” of your music folder and start scraping details off the CDDB (Compact Disc DataBase) on the internet, applying what it finds to the metadata of your music files regardless of how long ago they were created. They could even monitor the entire folder for changes and act automatically when they see any. If such an application were doing this, and had the option to include track numbering disabled, it could easily cause the problems you describe, and how infrequently a file is played would bear no relevance to the application’s actions.

There are only 2 means of me to listed to my music - via Sonos in my home, on an iPod when outside my home. The iPod is my only Apple product and I do not let iTunes manage my library or give permissions to edit metadata. I only manually update the iPod when new music is added to my library about 2 times a year as I only use it when camping in the summer. That leads to the likelihood of this being a factor very low. Within hours of fixing the metadata, re-indexing the library, the issue was repeated. So, something with Sonos and how it is handling compilations has changed. Ideas?

iTunes is far more likely to be making any changes to your files than Sonos - I recommend checking to ensure there have been no changes to the iTunes options and/or permissions. And, I sought confirmation from a colleague - we’ve changed nothing in terms of indexing the Music Library. So, while I cannot tell you why or how your files are being altered, I can tell you that any changes in the organisation of the files within the Sonos app will be due to these changes to the files, as we have changed nothing about how the app displays the results of the indexing.

While I do realise I am still not giving you any steps that will fix your problem for you, I hope I have given you enough to help concentrate your efforts to where they will come to the most fruition.

 

 

Well, not saying specifically that Sonos changed metadata. What I can clearly say is that the metadata is different from what has been created. I am not sure exactly what is being indexed and what priority is given to which fields. What I can say is that the track in question had a track number, it was somehow - somewhere removed. When corrected and the Sonos library was indexed again, the track number was no longer there - again.

Since that tiny little nugget of detail I provided was your only focus, then you are not really providing help. There are bigger fish to fry than that. That piece is a related nugget to a much bigger issue. Why is the indexing deciding to ignore the metadata as entered and well established for over 10 years. This is not something that has been this way all along, it is something that within the last year or so has caused my library within Sonos to be jumbled and not to what I established and took painstaking effort to format to the way I wish to enjoy my music.

And please tell me what other software would be doing this. This is a CD that I ripped once, over 10 years ago. It is not played regularly, in fact it may go months without being played. There are only 2 means of me to listed to my music - via Sonos in my home, on an iPod when outside my home. The iPod is my only Apple product and I do not let iTunes manage my library or give permissions to edit metadata. I only manually update the iPod when new music is added to my library about 2 times a year as I only use it when camping in the summer. That leads to the likelihood of this being a factor very low. Within hours of fixing the metadata, re-indexing the library, the issue was repeated. So, something with Sonos and how it is handling compilations has changed. Ideas?

If you’re looking for ideas, then post-editing, perhaps set the shared music library folder to read only and have the tracks, album folders etc. inherit that permission from the share - I can’t see anything being able to alter the tracks after that. 

I don’t personally goto those lengths with my own library NAS share, as I edit/add things too regularly to be bothered with switching permissions, but my Sonos library is indexed daily and I can’t think of a time when I’ve lost track metadata. I use MP3Tag for my own tag editing and I’m not missing any track numbers here, last time I checked - all was good. Maybe it’s your tag editor?

SONOS access to the NAS files is read only. The indexer asks the NAS for a list of files and processes the tracks in the order received. This can cause some interesting dramas if there are multiple copies of the same track, each with slightly different metadata. In the case of duplicates, only the first track will be included in the index. If there is a Recycle folder in the share, this will often be processed first giving rise to the complaint that metadata changes are being ignored -- because the user is working with the main file while the indexer used the Recycle track. If there are duplicates in the main body of the library and the tracks are presented in different orders during different runs, the metadata may seem to jump around.

I’m not an Apple Music User and have no experience with any of its potential monkey business. I have no issues with my library.

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