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Track order broken due to multiple artists on an album


I posted this in another topic, but it seemed that it required its own topic, as I couldn’t find any existing posts about it:

 

Yes, in addition to the multiple copies of albums, which appears to happen due to multiple artists on an album, the track listings are also screwed up due to multiple album artists.

 

And YES, I HAVE “SORT FOLDERS BY” SET TO “SONG NUMBER”.  Just wanted to clarify.

 

The track listings are now sorted by the “Artist” meta data and then the track number.  Here’s an example from my library from Tha Alkaholiks album “21 & Over” - this is the order of the tracks listed and the Artist metadata, so you can see how the sorting is broken by sorting on the Artist.  All the meta data for these tracks are fine - the track listing is displayed correctly in the Apple Music application, but here’s what Sonos displays for the track order:

 

Track 02 - Tha Alkaholiks

Track 03 - Tha Alkaholiks

Track 04 - Tha Alkaholiks

Track 08 - Tha Alkaholiks

Track 09 - Tha Alkaholiks

Track 07 - Tha Alkaholiks Feat. Field Trip

Track 01 - Tha Alkaholiks Feat. King Tee

Track 06 - Tha Alkaholiks Feat. King Tee

Track 05 - Tha Alkaholiks Feat. Loopback

Track 10 - Tha Alkaholiks Feat. Threat

 

SONOS, this is basic functionality.  WTF are you doing there?

Best answer by Corry P

Hi @kirkjh 

Welcome to the Sonos Community!

Thanks for flagging - we are aware of this issue and are investigating, though we have no ETA on a fix at present. I will update this thread once a fix is in place.

I hope this helps.

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11 replies

  • Contributor I
  • 4 replies
  • August 9, 2024

I found the same - I’m suspecting the app is not sorting on Contributing Artist and not Album Artist? I agree, WTF is the appropriate question.

SONOS can we get a response here?


  • Author
  • Contributor I
  • 4 replies
  • August 9, 2024

Yes, when I pull up mp3 metadata in Apple Music, it’s sorting on the “Artist” field (i.e. not the “Album Artist” field) instead of, you know, THE TRACK NUMBER! 😁

 

Thanks for replying and keeping this alive.  I can’t believe it’s been broken like this for over two weeks now.  I’ve been trusting this company for nearly 20 years and have been very impressed with everything.  Since the May app release, I can’t believe how bad SONOS has been handling everything.  Really disappointing.

 


  • Lyricist III
  • 7 replies
  • August 9, 2024

Same here.  This seems like something not complicated to fix - after all, it’s just a question of indexing on the correct field.  Why has it taken months (and still counting) to get this resolved?  When are they planning on resolving the multiple-album problem?  For those of us drawn to Sonos because of its ability to play our own music library, this issue makes my system, on which I have spent thousands of dollars, virtually unuseable.


  • Author
  • Contributor I
  • 4 replies
  • August 10, 2024

Yes, this would only take a few minutes to fix to just fix the sorting error.  It’s even more discouraging that this bug was released.  The Quality Assurance people should have caught this, since the dev that screwed this up did not.

 

Whoever is running their software team needs some help, if not replacement.

 


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  • Enthusiast I
  • 44 replies
  • August 10, 2024

I was able to select folders and all my albums were in there in order. Now when I select folders it just goes to a search option and the ability to just browse through albums has gone. Thankfully it is still working on SonoPad.


Corry P
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  • Sonos Staff
  • 8187 replies
  • Answer
  • August 13, 2024

Hi @kirkjh 

Welcome to the Sonos Community!

Thanks for flagging - we are aware of this issue and are investigating, though we have no ETA on a fix at present. I will update this thread once a fix is in place.

I hope this helps.


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  • Lyricist III
  • 6 replies
  • September 4, 2024

Yet another request to stop compiling multiple-artist or compilation albums as a separate but duplicate album entry for each artist (which often ends up being for each track on the album) in the Music Library.

Came here looking for a solution to that but apparently there is none and it’s a long known and long standing problem  mentioned in multiple threads, just randomly chose this one to reply to. 

At the very least if the possibility of albums with the same name but that are truly identically named different albums by different artists needs to be accounted for, the app should be looking at the AlbumArtist tag, not the Artist tag, since most often AlbumArtist is set to “Various Artists” or to the album compiler (eg Time-Life).

Very frustrating because you can’t really queue one of the albums by just queueing the album, you have to queue each of the 25 or 100 or whatever songs that are on it each individually.  Very frustrating also that it’s so long-standing a problem, when it’s a very easy fix.


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  • Contributor II
  • 6 replies
  • September 12, 2024

I had to rename all the tracks on a certain compilation album in order to get the tracks to play in the correct order. Thus, “Except Ghosts” had to be renamed “1 Except Ghosts” and “Spectral” had to be renamed “2 Spectral”, etc. What a mess.


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  • Contributor I
  • 9 replies
  • September 12, 2024

My library being mostly rap and hip-hop where there are features on almost every track makes this bug suuuuuuuper fun.

How many engineers does Sonos really need to change the indexer from using the “Artist” tag to the “AlbumArtist” tag????

 

Sonos has become the bane of my existence this year.


  • Lyricist I
  • 1 reply
  • September 12, 2024

Same issue here, for well over a month now. Why is it taking so long to sort out what looks like a simple indexing issue??

Honestly you couldn’t have made a bigger screw up of this whole sorry new app update saga if you had tried…


  • Lyricist I
  • 1 reply
  • September 23, 2024

I too have this problem. Albums being sorted/displayed by track artist when it should be album artist. Resulting in albums with multiple artists but with the album artist set to “Various” or “Various Artists”  being listed multiple times when it should be listed only once


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