Show the Composer tag on the Now Playing screen

I went back to TS with this

Thanks for your reply. Could you pass this suggestion to the devs and highlight that we've been asking for this for 5 years?

and got

all requests are monitored by our developers, so no worries it is being looked at.

I think Charles is right. We need to bombard TS with this one......They're clearly NOT looking at it....

I'll be contacting support to also raise this. Don't see any reason why composer can't be added. It's annoying and ugly to have to include compose within the (already long) titles of each track.

The information can be read directly from the file. I suggest that the entire tagged info be made available as part of the menu. Who played the sax here? Who is the soprano? This information is often in my collection, and could be easily displayed. I just updated the tagging using Picard from MusicBrainz. To read it. I would have to log in to my computer and run a program there. Perhaps log into MusicBrainz.

Just thought I'd bump this. Not really sure Sonos listen to user requests but worth a go.....:-)

Me too. I'm listening to something now (from Qobuz stream service) from a Glenn Gould album but have no idea which composer wrote it! Because composer is excluded from the now playing info. It seems selection of certain fields for now playing is an easy option to include in settings.

Another person waiting and waiting and...

Give it up, guys. Sonos has made it clear that their focus is only on the streaming world. They've left us local library guys stranded with what we have.

BCM wrote:

Give it up, guys. Sonos has made it clear that their focus is only on the streaming world. They've left us local library guys stranded with what we have.

But composer is not revealed in Sonos when playing streamed music either. So the problem here is that they don't care about classical music.

Actually, I believe it's absolutely impossble to get information on the composer of a track if it's not (erreneously) encoded into Artist, Album or Track by the streaming service.

Classical music in the streaming services is a complete disaster where everything is mixed up becuase the databases are not adjusted for classical music and no one knows where to put the important information. As far as I can see Sonos does absolutely nothing to improve the experience from these services. On the contrary it works even worse in Sonos than in the actual Spotify/Deezer and other apps. It's a big joke how badly these things work everywhere.

There's a lot of buzz regarding AI and thinking computers and even Sonos now has implemented a speaker that is supposed to trick us to belive there's some kind of intelligence behind the scenes when in fact no one has even managed to make such a simple thing as making the composer of a track searchable and viewable in systems that has been around for a decade. There's no intelligence present here at all and in some cases the crucial information (like soloists, arrangers e.t.c.) was probably thrown away when the track was ripped into the streaming servie and is lost forever.

And where are the sleeves? Gone forever apart from a small scan of the front cover. Pathetic.

I can't believe this has been requested for 5 years and Sonos are still ignoring it......"you asked . We listened", they say. Erm .....no ....we asked.....for five years......and you ignored us........

Seems like a lost cause. I have been a loyal Sonos user for ten years. For the last two years I have been using Apple Music and Sonos. It works quite well but being unable to view the composer is a real downside. Have been using Apple TV to play my Apple Music library. The composer is then visible.

Another disappointed user who would like to see the composer. I don't understand why Sonos has been ignoring users for such a long time. Even if they don't want to display the composer directly on the "playing now" screen, there should be at least an option to show the content of all indexed fields, including composer, from the three-dots-menu (where users can also select, e.g., "show all titles of this album" etc.).
Sonos, please listen to your users and don't just listen, but also do something about it!

I completely agree. Not showing the composer is crazy, for classical music. What makes me really sad is reading in this thread that five years ago people were complaining that this has been asked for five years before that, so they have been not listening for ten years...

+1

Please, let us choose which tag should be visible on the Now Playing screen: I'm doing a backup of all my classical library (about 3000 cds) and... I've just realized that if I want to know a composer or a specific Album Artist I have to get back to my cd sleeve! I spent many days to set up a tagging method to discover that it is useless on my new Sonos system.
I'm very disappointed. Please, let me know that you'll fix this issue...
Thanks.

Sonos have made it very clear over the years that they're simply not interested in fetching any tagging information from either local library or subscription services other than the album artwork on-the-fly (we can assume Sonos units store the absolute minimum tagging required for navigation/display due to limited local library memory and/or "UI simplicity").

Using a separate source - iTunes, CD booklet, Wikipedia (and seek out some alternative controllers like Sonopad if you want that integrated) - is likely to be your only solution.

Thank you very much for your reply.
Unfortunately, I didn't know the Sonos Policy. I can understand Sonos but... I dreamt something else.
I'll try alternative controllers to find out if there is someone which is getting closer to my expectations.
Many thanks, Alan.

d0A0b wrote:

Thank you very much for your reply.
Unfortunately, I didn't know the Sonos Policy. I can understand Sonos but... I dreamt something else.
I'll try alternative controllers to find out if there is someone which is getting closer to my expectations.
Many thanks, Alan.

Well, at least Sonos are all about giving users a consistent and predictable experience (rather than a great one). And sadly, like the experience of buying music digitally, it does seem to be that most services believe that "liner notes and lyrics" info should not be delivered along with the music (or at all). Like so many software "solutions", the high-tech workaround for missing expected functionality is a piece of paper...

I've been looking at the data the system provides when enumerating and playing content, and I don't see the Composer data anywhere. You can Search the music library by composer, so it is stored somewhere for that, but i don't see it being returned at any other time.

TL;DR I don't think a 3rd party app could improve on the current experience, as the data is not available.

You're right that the data has to be available, either in a tagging database for fast access, or by going direct to the file system for tagging (or artwork file). I'm assuming that Sonos systems store the absolute minimum local library tagging necessary for navigation (to save memory). Whether it's even possible to get Sonos to read a local FLAC/MP3 file's tags is another question. And if different local/streaming libraries offer different tagging support, offering the minimum tags for consistency might be the smart move.

I can see a "composer" tag in my local library FLAC, would the average streaming service offer such a thing?