Music Library Compilations Issue Under 16.3.

I’m just using the data in the app - here shows as release 20240717.

Honestly Rhonny - I appreciate your detail, but honestly don’t care
all I care is that Sonos hasn’t worked since the 16.3 broke it - which for me was last week on July 18 when I open my windows desktop app and updated.

I’m not sending you any more Christmas cards, Scoott. 

Haha, this nonsense is so bad, at this point all you can do is laugh.

Thankfully I had never updated the Windows Desktop app as it was the only thing I could use to set alarms after the May fiasco. I come back from holiday, and now my library is completely messed up - and I didn’t even update anything! Not only are the compilation albums showing as a list of tracks, when I try and play the track I want, it plays a completely different track! If you were trying to create the worst app in the world, you wouldn’t be able to make it this bad.

On my iPhone, with the latest update, my Music Library now appears more reliably than before. That’s it. The alphabet to the right hand side STILL isn’t there, so I can’t jump to an album, every track I’ve tried to play so far doesn’t work, and the alarm feature is STILL nerfed (I can’t edit any alarms in the app, if I try and save a change, nothing happens).

Another broken thing. It’s exhausting keeping up with this nonsense. I hate Sonos.

There was a system update a week ago that impacted some people’s systems. But the app update on Monday had elements intended to help with that and music library access in general - just checking: have you updated the app?

Edit: just saw the line about you running the current apps...

Just to clarify my initial comment, I do see my current/updated “Imported Playlists” under “Music Library,” but attempting to play any of the playlists gives me the spinning (about 30 seconds of it), then the message “Unable to browse music.”

This guy just won’t quit with the mealy-mouthed, dishonest updates.

It is by now well established that the app update was so they could meet their deadline for selling the new headphones, and had nothing to do with improved performance, which is what is claimed in the letter.

The employees aren’t pained at our frustration, they’re pained because they got dropped in it by the CEO and engineering colleagues, who engineered one of the greatest foul-ups in product development history. This will be being taught in business school for decades, as a case study in how not to do things.

How this guy has not yet resigned is beyond me - it clearly needs someone else in charge to rebuild brand loyalty.

The big problem I’m seeing is with “X feat Y” guest artists on tracks. I did a quick experiment with flipping the Music Library->Group Albums Using setting, from “Album Artists” (which has worked for 15 years) to “iTunes”. My tags usually read artist=“Artist; Guest”, album artist=”Artist”.

When I tried the iTunes setting, tracks with “Artist; Guest” disappear from the library. With the “Album Artist” grouping, you get either multiple copies of the album or a random tracklist order.

Weirdly, the desktop and mobile behaviour is different. Here’s an example - the last Ozzy Osbourne album, which is loaded with guest stars. Inspecting the tags in foobar shows the “Artist; Guest” tags look like this: 

With Album-Artist grouping, the latest Sonos desktop app (and 3rd party SonoPad app) finds all the tracks, just not in the right order: 

And the iOS app thinks the 13-track album only consists of the three songs with no guest artist!

So it might be a new bug with the player firmware, there are possible bugs with the desktop app, but there’s definitely a bug with the nowhere-near-shippable new mobile app.

I can’t see any pattern for why some albums like this also list multiple copies with the same broken unordered tracklist.

There is drastic workaround, which is to edit tags, and put the featured artist in the track title instead of the artist tag. Which I may have to do.

Update: tried Group Albums Using “do not group”, same as the “iTunes” setting.

I did a quick search to see if the problem is my tags all along. Looks like there might not be a recommended way to separate multiple artists using ID3 tags, and “;” can confuse some players/apps. I think the track ordering bug is due to Sonos now taking only the last artist tag value (the “guest artist”) and ordering tracks alphabetically by this artist (ie. the final “guest” artist listed) then by track number. This also accounts for the multiple copies of the album showing up (one per guest/no-guest artist combination). So maybe the “bug” is actually that Sonos has switched overnight from “accepts many different tagging formats” to “only works with specific tagging format(s)”. With “;” as my dbPoweramp-supplied separator, desktop app now treats the tag as different artists for the same album (but not multiple artists per track), mobile app can’t handle multiple artists in the same tag.

Hi @Alan_6 

We are aware of this issue and are investigating - I recommend that you do not adjust tags on your files just to address this issue.

I hope this helps.

It would be. App updates are being rolled out fortnightly, so I wouldn't expect the next update until next Monday. And even then there is no guarantee this issue will be covered by this update as it was only reported/acknowledged relatively, but it will be somewhere on the list and will be in a future update...