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The order of albums doesn’t make sense and there’s no sort functionality to fix it. This has been an issue going back over 6 years. Will this ever be fixed Sonos?

 

See the attached examples where Little Simz latest album is not at the top of the bottom but 6 from the bottom of the list!

Yes, IF the music service changes how it wants their search results to show.

Any content displayed inside of a music service within the Sonos app is controlled by the service themselves. They decide which content to show and how it should be displayed.


Going by your example, there is some logic to the order:

  1. Studio albums by the artist
  2. Songs where the artist is featured 
  3. Singles by the artist

Going by your example, there is some logic to the order:

  1. Studio albums by the artist
  2. Songs where the artist is featured 
  3. Singles by the artist

That does not appear to be the case if you look at the full list.

@brandos - both Spotify and Amazon Music list albums in chronological order on Sonos, so it can be done if implemented by the music service. Petition Apple (I assume that is your music service) to amend their artist layout.


Sonos never sort third-party content, for many good reasons. The order of items is 100% determined by the music service (whatever one you are using here).


Thanks for the replies. I’ve tried Spotify and it sorts chronologically.

 

Can anyone let me know what the “many good reasons” are that Sonos won’t include a sort in the app?


Thanks for the replies. I’ve tried Spotify and it sorts chronologically.

 

Can anyone let me know what the “many good reasons” are that Sonos won’t include a sort in the app?

  1. When to sort (eg album names), when not (eg track names)
  2. What to sort by? There are ~10 different fields available, though most items only have 3 or so
  3. Sonos doesn’t even know things like “when added” or “release date” so cannot possibly sort by criteria whose data is not known
  4. In order to sort a list of X items, it has to download all X items first. Much more efficient to sort on the server (e.g. with a SQL query) than download everything then sort on the app. Also has to send the entire sorted list to the speaker - normally the speaker just does a GetNext call to the server, would not work once the list is arbitrarily sorted by a client.

There are many threads on this and I can’t make any sense of it. Not being able to display albums sorted by artist (like most apps do) makes me want to stop using Sonos altogether. Sorting by album title is just silly, who does that. I use apple music service and the sort order is artist then album as you would expect, so I do not understand how Sonos is just doing what the streaming service is, it isn’t.


There are many threads on this and I can’t make any sense of it. Not being able to display albums sorted by artist (like most apps do) makes me want to stop using Sonos altogether. Sorting by album title is just silly, who does that. I use apple music service and the sort order is artist then album as you would expect, so I do not understand how Sonos is just doing what the streaming service is, it isn’t.

So are you talking about Local Library albums? Those are alphabetic by album name. That is how they are indexed in the database and for the reasons I described above are not sortable.


Isn’t playing your library one of the key features of Sonos. Every other music playing app can sort sensibly on a local library. Apple Music allows you to add albums to your library and sorts by albums artist so you can browse your albums. Sonos picks up this library which is great but then sorts albums by title only which is pretty silly. I did read the reasoning but not convinced it is so impossible.

yes there would be choices but the key ones like sort by artist or date would satisfy 90% of people. Not being able to do everything is not a reason to do nothing. I think also performance could be overcome with caching etc.

People have been asking for this for 10 years from the posts I have seen so I don’t hold out any hope but It really does make using Sonos annoying for me. I certainly wouldn’t recommend Sonos to anyone as the user experience revolves around the app, which is not good.

 


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