Same problem here. All compilation albums or albums featuring “various artists” from my Music Library display as one “album” per song, where none of them are playable.

The folks at Sonos must have a very narrow set of use-cases for those who use the Music Library.

There have been many threads on this already. A firmware update ages ago broke the indexer, and Sonos have no apparent plan to fix that.

Today Firmware 16.4.2 was released and the album compilation bug has been fixed.

And yet, it isnt - a discrete part of the puzzle was tidied up if you have your music sorted by itunes. 

and a second part Album art seems to have reappeared (for myself at least)

Album artists is not 

Yes, sorting by the iTunes compilation method is not working, this option still appears in the desktop app but not iOS / Android. I had about 200 CD compilations that were ripped by iTunes many years ago and the album Artist tags were blank. Took a short while to propagate “Various Artists” into those albums and hey presto my local library is fully back.

Belly M, can you provide more information on how you “propogated various artists into the albums.? I see that some of my compilations now appear as only one title. But none of them, or the ones that have the album title repeated for each song, has any underlying song(s) to play. 

 I use DbPoweramp to tag.  MP3 Tag probably works the same.  For compilations I tag as follows:  Artist - Track Name - Album - Track Number - Date - Genre - Album Artist.  The Artist tag should be the actual performer say for example Bad Company.  Because this compilation has several performers on it the Album Artist tag should be Various Artists.  That Various Artist tag for Album Artist should be for all tracks that way the compilation will show as one album.

I use a couple of Apps on the Mac, one is called Tag and the other Bliss. Tag is simpler but easy to use.

In Tag… literally open the album (I actually open all the compilations starting with A, then move onto B etc.), select all the tracks and paste Various Artists into the Album Artist tag field and save. I have all my compilations in one folder so did not have to go hunting the albums down.

Added the share back into Sonos and was done, initially I just added the 200 odd albums to double check as adding my main share takes about 30 minutes. 

While I agree that by using Various Artist (should it be Various Artist or Various Artists or doesn’t it matter?) in the Album Artist field does work it has a side effect. You cannot search for a specific artist within a compilation that has Various Artist as its Album Artist field.

As an example, Album = Best Days Of My Life, if I search for James Bay it returns nothing. But if I then search for Various Artist, it returns loads of tracks, one of which is Let It Go, by James Bay.

The only way to find that particular artist is to go through Contributing Artist and scroll through the long list until you find it. There doesn’t seem to be a way of searching on the Contributing Artist field. There is only, a search on Artists, Albums, Composers, Songs & Genres

It always worked correctly before the Courageous Sonos app when the Album Artist field was empty and the compilation box was ticked & the albums were neatly grouped together.

I may be missing something, I stand to be corrected, in fact suggestions are welcome. As a side point I use Tag & Rename for my tags on a Windows PC I’ve used it for years & it seems pretty effective.

Anthony

 Is the Artist tag James Bay for the compilation album Best Days Of My Life?  If it is a search for James Bay in Music Library on Sonos app should return all the albums he has performed on including Best Days Of My Life.

 As an example I have a compilation where Diana Ross is one of the artists.  When I search the Music Library for Diana Ross the compilation album is one of the albums listed.

 It does not matter what is in the Album Artist tag.  In fact I actually only put Various in that tag.  I only used the example Various Artists because that seems to be the most popular entry.

 Is the Artist tag James Bay for the compilation album Best Days Of My Life?  If it is a search for James Bay in Music Library on Sonos app should return all the albums he has performed on including Best Days Of My Life.

 As an example I have a compilation where Diana Ross is one of the artists.  When I search the Music Library for Diana Ross the compilation album is one of the albums listed.

 

Hi, thanks for that info, it does work okay on the IOS iPad app & on Android, I hadn’t tested those. But on the Windows app (16.4.2) it doesn’t work. However as I usually use the IOS app & Android app that isn’t too much of a problem. Once again thanks for your help.

The SONOS system is still a mess and doesn't seem to adhere to any other method of interpreting tag metadata that I've seen. I'm honestly not sure how they - SONOS - have written their software to read metadata.

I very recently added the album 'Acadia' by Yasmin Williams to my music library. On the album and in every online reference I've seen the Album is credited to Yasmin Williams. So I tagged Yasmin Williams as Album Artist. However, on many of the tracks, the Artist is listed as 'Yasmin Williams feat. ... '  Obviously, sensibly, correctly, I tagged the Track Artist with those specific details. The result in SONOS is that I can't play the album from start to finish. I have about 8 entries for albums, all with an identical title Acadia, and all consisting of one or two tracks. If I search for Yasmin Williams I get the Album credited to her, Acadia, but it only contains the tracks on which she alone is credited

SONOS doesn't appear to understand the hierarchy and relationship between Album and Track, and Album Artist and Artist. I have no such problems when playing this album in other non-SONOS software on my Windows PC or Android phone. It's like the SONOS developers have never listened to an entire album, and only ever spend their lives listening to streamed music from a random shuffled source.

And don't get me started on classical albums ... !

 For the Yasmin Williams album try adding the feat. Artists to the Album Artist tag an have Yasmin Williams for the Artist ( Track Artist ) tag.  Then reindex, and search for Yasmin Williams again.  All the tracks should then be on the Acadia album.

 I listen to a lot of classical music where the tags are all over the map.  For me to have successful search results I have to make the Artist & Album Artist tags both the last name of the composer.  For compilation albums where in the same album there are the two pieces Malcolm Arnold: Symphony No. 2  &  Roy Harris: Symphony No. 1 that becomes two different albums: Symphony No. 2 & Symphony No. 1.  Each with the last name of those two composers Arnold & Harris in the appropriate album.

The new app still seems a bit deficient in its settings, and I wonder if your local library has the right advanced settings? On my iPhone I just have add shared folder, Scan for new content and detect music library, whatever that does… On the Mac desktop controller there’s an advanced tab which allows a group albums by option that I think needs to be on Album Artists. That setting needs to make its way into the new app before they retire the desktop controllers … 

My albums that have featured artists in the artist tag, that were generating multiple album entries are correct again after the very latest firmware and a re-index. 

We are all payed up customers and here we are dealing with things we probably shouldn’t even know about in an effort to work around the alterations Sonos made to their product to prevent it from working (through ignorance not malicious intent). This has to end. Sonos are you listening?

Thanks for the response. 

However I do think that that Yasmin Williams workaround is fundamentally wrong. It goes against the facts. Yasmin Williams credited the album to herself, and the individual tracks to her plus the featured artists. If you change these absolute facts, you might as well tag it as a Frank Sinatra album! Other media players, say like foobar2k, have no problem interpreting the tag metadata correctly.

I sympathise entirely with the classical issues. I too have many classical recordings. In a music collectors group I was a member of I argued long and hard that you shouldn't put the Composer in the Artist tag. There is a perfectly good Composer tag in the MP3 spec to hold this. Most of my acquaintances simply put the Composer in the Artist field, "because it's easier." Well, they may have thought that, but I insisted they were wrong. Imagine if you had a recording of a piano sonata with Beethoven as the Artist - wow!! The only time I'd have the Composer in the Artist field would be if they had genuinely played on the recording as well as having Composed it. I have a few Benjamin Britten recordings in that category.

I'm sorry to dismiss your suggestion. I've spent a long time working out what for me is a high precision tagging system. It satisfies me and it works really well with all competent media player software. Including, amazingly enough, the obsolete SONOS S1 app. I'm too invested in this personally to throw it aside. I don't have the same emotional attachment to SONOS, and this could be the breaking point for me.

Thank you for the suggestions and areas to explore.

I have a Windows desktop app and Android mobile app, but even so, the Apple apps layout must be nearly identical.

I inspected the 'Group Albums by' option, but I already had it as Album Artists. So no joy there. However, I also looked at my software release and it was 16.3. Having seen your reference to 'very latest' release I prompted an update, and after a couple of errors (hey, come on, it's SONOS. Of course there were errors!) I ended up with 16.4.2. Then I reindexed my 20k+ tracks local library.

WOW! The indexing issue seems fixed! I almost wrote 'well done SONOS' but that would be going too far. I think a milder 'thank you SONOS' is more appropriate. We're getting back to where we were all these months ago. Next on my personal priorities would be to get album art displayed on my mobile app. It's there on the desktop app, so my fingers are crossed …

I'm smiling today. :)

OK, I might even go a little higher than 'thank you SONOS'. I've just discovered another benefit of the upgrade.

On the classical side I have about 20 recordings of Bach's Goldberg Variations. That used to be a nightmare! Because the album title was, by definition, identical for all of these, SONOS used to lump them all together in one mega-album, with 20 Track 1s, 20 Track 2s etc. To separate them I had to re-tag them all so the each album name appeared unique. What a nuisance. To be honest, the same also applied to albums titled 'Greatest Hits' or 'Gold' but not quite on the same scale.

However, while browsing my local music library now I spotted two albums with identical titles. One is by Ella Fitzgerald and the other by Charlie Barnet. I obviously hadn't spotted this overlap when adding the second one. But SONOS has got each one correctly identified and indexed so that only one artist and set of tracks appears in each album. That is such a leap forward again! I wonder if I can now re-tag my Goldberg Variations recordings with the correct, as on the album, title?

Could I fall in love with SONOS again?

Incidentally, my previous comment about missing album art may be an Android issue. I was infuriated to see that my wife and her iPhone have the album art displayed. I just have the grey placeholders for tracks, albums, artists on my Pixel 7. More investigation called for I fear.

@Walter Eagle 
 Back when I started all this digital library stuff the software I was using had no Composer category.

That is so often the problem. The MP3 specification permits metadata that describes things like Composer, Lyricist, Songwriter, (even Librettist) but not every tag editing software makes use of these or gives you access to them. And then, of course, if you are able to edit them, there's no guarantee that MP3 player software will read all that data.

It's a long hard road, and I can well understand why people accept compromises for the sake of continuity. iTunes is not perfect in my view but it is very consistent and widely used as a standard for tagging and playing.

Mine now has compilations that show as a single album but there is still nothing in them. I have others that show as multiple albums but do contain fragments of the album. 

If you have access to the old Sonos Windows, or MAC OS, desktop App, then go into the library settings in that App and switch the ‘Group Albums Using…’ option to ‘Album Artists’. Let the library reindex and then see if that perhaps resolves your issue.

I was wrong in how I expressed things in my previous post. The specification that defines the use and purpose of metadata is of course ID3, not MP3. MP3 only refers to the file audio content, not the additional descriptive metadata. Apologies. When we're all suffering problems imposed by SONOS it doesn't help to get the details wrong.

  I think that the key is that all music files belonging to a single album should have the same tag value for Album and the same tag value for Album Artist. They should then have different values as appropriate for the tag Artist.

What are you using to write these tag values to your files? In theory, if SONOS doesn't change how they read this data, the writing should be a once-only task.

My, very recent, experience with v16.4 SONOS is that it now seems to interpret the hierarchy and relationship between these tags correctly as I wish.

Good luck.

These albums are just as they were copied into iTunes. I didn't change anything. They worked just fine in two homes with two different generations of Sonos equipment until July.