music library search misses songs

Hello, Vincent. Welcome to the community. Please send us a diagnostic of your system and respond with the confirmation number. We will have a look at the issue for you and will hopefully be able to provide a fix. Here are some instructions on how to do this. Please respond with the confirmation number. Thank you in advance.

Cool, thanks 🙂 Diagnostic confirmation number is 6837216.
Regards,
vincent

Hi Vincent, sorry for the delay it's been very busy of late. The diagnostic is showing an error message "unsupported format tag: 0x0163" when trying to index some of your tracks, though it isn't specific about which tracks. This is the code for WMA Lossless tracks which are likely too high bitrate for Sonos, or protected. Usually the former than the later. This would account for tracks that aren't showing up in Sonos at all. You could check some missing tracks to see what format they are in and what their bitrate is at. You can find the supported audio formats for Sonos here which doesn't include lossless WMA formats.

The tracks that aren't searching correctly need to have the right tags in there as well. For WAV tracks, the metadata support can be pretty poor sometimes, so anything in that format might not search or index properly depending on how the metadata is tagged.

Great, thanks for checking the diagnosis ! :)

I think that I found the issue:
if the 'Album artists' tag is filled in (eg: 'Various Artists'), then a search for the 'Artist' tag will return no match.
It's reproducable (see details below please)

details
-in Android app: removed the share of my music library
-added 1 song to a new testdirectory. Artist tag of the song: 'Scorpio Rising' ; 'Album artist' = 'Various Artists'
-reindexed my library (android app)
-search for artist 'Scorpio' or 'Scorpio Rising' -> no match
-edited the mp3 file: removed (cleared) the Album artist tag
-reindexed my library (android app)
-search for artist 'Sc' / 'Sco' / 'Scorpio' / ... -> match

It looks like somewhere in the indexing process, the app discards the Artist tag if the 'Album Artist' is filled in? If it could help for the Sonos Support Team, I can send you that mp3 file. But I just tried with an other random song: as soon as the Album Artist is filled in, the app does not check the Artist tag anymore.

This might help. Check under Sonos Settings > Music Library > Advanced and check out what it says under "Group Albums using:"

You could try changing that and see if it changes how the search results get polled.

Hi,
it's set to group my albums by 'Album artist', this is the way I want it.
Example: a compilation album of different artists -> 'Album artist' is set to 'Various Artists'. And 'Artist' is filled in with the artist that made the song. But I still want this album to appear as a single album (that's why I use this setting).

However, I cannot understand by doing this, that searching for an artist, will not list the songs of that artist on that compilation album? I can not see that this behaviour could have a purpose?

When you have the index set to group using Album Artist, that tag will be indexed instead of the Artist tag. So when you go to search for songs with that grouping option, the Artist name isn't being indexed for search.

I've passed a request on to the team that you'd like the search to look for both, but it's in part to do with how the tracks get indexed on Sonos.

hello Ryan S,

thanks for your replies. I've been doing some further tests. If I'm understanding correctly, is Sonos not having a correct way to handle compilation albums? :?

Hi Vincent.
I noticed a similar problem when searching for an artist. If a band name begins with "the", the the word "the" does not appear in the index. The Doors appears as Doors' under D. Searching for The Doors returns no results from my music library, but it finds The Doors on Amazon Music. Confusing eh!

Hey I'm listening :)
thanks for your reply. I checked it out, and I have the same here as well.
I got these artists : "The Doors" and "The Beatles" (with the "the" word in the tag as well), and searching for "The Beatles" does not give any results. Searching for "Beatles" does find the artist (although in the tag "The Beatles" is saved).

This will be linked to the fact that sorting ignores any "The" in front of a band/artist name. This makes sense because else The "t" section of the list would be over represented.

This will be linked to the fact that sorting ignores any "The" in front of a band/artist name. This makes sense because else The "t" section of the list would be over represented.
As you explain it, it makes sense indeed that the "the" was omitted during the indexing. Thanks for pointing me out.
However, I think that the search function should be smart enough to know that the "the" could have been omitted during indexing so it should search for "%artist%" or "%the artist%"

This will be linked to the fact that sorting ignores any "The" in front of a band/artist name. This makes sense because else The "t" section of the list would be over represented.

Hi Stuart_W,
I saw you're on the Sonos community for quite some time, are you able to handle compilation albums or do you have the same problem?

This thread has some useful discussion on this topic

https://en.community.sonos.com/music-services-and-sources-228994/how-to-organise-compilation-album-id3-tags-help-6734932

ultimately everybody see there albums and music differently. So whatever I see as a requirement you may have a different thought.

An other search that does not work:
the song's title is tagged: "Waves (Robin Schulz Remix)"
When I search songs (Android app) for "waves" -> No hits
When I search songs (Android app) for "waves (" -> finds the song.

Not sure whether there will be a logical explanation for this one?

Hey vincent, how's it going? Have you been looking into this a bit more?

There's no major reason that the "(" is needed at the end of that search string. Odds are, there's something else getting in the way. Something to work with, is that when you start to search using a mobile app, the controller is doing Universal Search, so sometimes it takes a while to populate. It's possible that "waves" is pulling up too many sources, or taking too long to search that it's failing to populate without additional search data.

When you go to search, if you were to add that space, would it pull up the results?

Can you run a search for that track and when it does pull up, select the gray "more" option if it shows up. Then change the search string to "waves" and see if it finds that track. That "more" searches just the one service you selected, as opposed to all of your sources.