fragmented compilation albums

If you have a PC, or Mac, with the Sonos Controller installed, goto the library settings and change the ‘Group Albums’ option to Album Artists and (if necessary) in the Album Artist track tag/metadata enter ‘Various Artists’ for each of your songs. Make sure you re-index the library in the Sonos App …and that should then resolve the issue.🤞

See below screenshot from the PC controller App.

Hope that works for you.

Hi Ken, many thanks for the response but unfortunately it did not work for me. You mention changing meta data. I had e just spent nearly an hour on then phone with Sonos who basically told me its was “out of scope” for them to help me and I had to change then meta data but I have no idea how to do that.

Is there a tool for that and how do I know what not change?

Regards,

James

Any tag editor will do - examples are mp3Tag, or iTunes, or Windows explorer (file properties) - it’s clearly outside of the Sonos Support remit to make such changes. My own choice would be to use the mp3Tag App.

Hi Ken 

many thanks for your reply. Finally I have sussed out the tags and mp3tag has been easy to use and works and has the desired effect on Sonos grouping etc

Surely it not much for sonos to put some basic guide on how sonos and tags work together. They is a section on tags but its more for developers.

regards

james

If you do change the meta data tags to various artists for compilation albums then do be aware that the artist will no longer appear in the artist view and search may no longer pick up the individual track artist either.
 

the artist will still appear if you have other albums by that same artist but their contribution to the compilation album will be missing.

I am stunned that Sonos know that the fragmented compilation albums is an issue, that they have rejected rolling back the change that created the problem and that they have not posted an official statement on how they see it being fixed.  
they tell you that meta tagging is the issue but don’t mention that it wasn’t a problem previously nor do they officially state that they now expect us all to modify the tags on all our compilation albums. I can see why they wouldn’t want to say that , it doesn’t look that good.

 Nor have I seen any mention, other than in this forum, of the other problems changing the album artist tag to ‘various artists’ causes.   
 

An infuriating situation..

This is not my experience - I can search/find a compilation album Artist via the Sonos App, even if there are no other albums by that artist, as their name is contained in the ‘Artist’ field, even though the ‘Album Artist’ field is set to ‘Various Artists’.

It works fine for my local library.

I did say “may” as the behavior of search depends on which controller you use but in my experience none of them show the artist or track in the  Artist view ,  do you see the artist and track in your artist view?

thinking a bit deeper on this it may also depend on whether you use wav or flac or similar. Most of my library is wav but I am experimenting with converting them to flac.   What format is your library in?

You mentioned ’search’ initially and in my iOS and Android Sonos controllers, if I search for the artist that has a track on a compilation album (only) and no other albums in my library, then the search result finds that artist and their track on the compilation album. The artist view should show you album and tracks under ’various artists’ but you can still find the actual track/artist by using the search facility, or the compilation album etc.

I spent yesterday converting all my compilation albums to FLAC format and found it made no difference to my observations that the individual artists do not show up with their compilation album track in the Artist View.  They are either missing or the artist will appear if you have other albums by that artist but it wont list the compilation track. 

Why would changing the encoding type change the meta data tags?

The WAV format is known to be problematic in its handling of tags. I read that FLAC has more of a standard approach to tags and was trying that approach.  

The compilation ‘artists’ will not show in the ‘Artist’ area of the library because the selection is to group by ‘Album Artists’ - you’ll find the tracks get moved to ‘Various Artists’ or whatever text you put in the ‘Album Artists’ tag/field but you should find you can use the Sonos search facility to find the individual artist with a track on a compilation album.

You can of course change the Sonos library index too by selecting the other option “do not group compilations” but you will only fragment the albums - but you will then see all artists, if that’s what you prefer, although it’s not a view i like to use, personally speaking.

Sonos should make this easy for the customer. If one chooses iTunes compilation, then the album listing should look like iTunes, unfragmented, with all the artist data intact.  Period.  The albums should simply be grouped by album name, not by album artist or track artist. That would solve the fragmentation problem,  The Sonos app used to work that way, so it can’t be too hard to adjust it to work that way again.  it is very anti-customer and very arrogant of Sonos to expect the users to expand hours and hours on their music libraries, changing the original album data, to get it to work.  And by the way, changing all album artists to various artists does not defragment the album. The only way to defragment the album is to also change the track artist to various artists, destroying the most important data of the album.  if Sonos wants to change its image after its software disaster, maybe you should do it by repairing the software.   Disappointing, disappointing, disappointing, Sonos still doesn’t get it.  

I hope someone at Sonos is actually listening. Change your software so that the albums are grouped by album name, and that tracks with the same album name are shown as a single album, without fragmentation. Since the whole marketing focus of Sonos was customer ease and plug and play, Sonos should actually make the software work.   You know, by definition, requiring customers to spend hours manipulating individual data items to get the software to work is not customer, friendly or plug and play.   It’s just bad.  

It shouldn’t take you (personally) ‘hours’, just a few minutes to put wheels in motion to change the one tag field of each ‘compilation’ track - I just set MP3Tag to change all the compilation album artists field to ‘Various Artists’ and walked away - the software did the rest and it was soon resolved.

I just had to reindex the local library (after completion) to resolve the display issue in the App, but again that scan can be started and the indexing will continue without any further user involvement.

The cost to the end-user in terms of time this takes is quite small, comparatively speaking. You don’t have to sit there and wait until the tags are updated, or the library has been re-indexed.

So customers need to obtain and learn to use a third-party piece of software, for Sonos to properly show our libraries?  And then have this software erase and substitute all the original data in an artist field, irreversibly?  Rather than all that imposition in the users - and since the third party software shows it can be done - why doesn’t Sonos simply adapt its own software, to ignore the album artist field, and correctly show the albums, unfragmented?  If the album artist field has to all be changed to an identical “Various Artists” tag, that means essentially that the field is being removed from Sonos’ consideration when determining how to list the album.  So —- just tell Sonos software to ignore the field, rather than have users do Sonos’ work for it.

Goodness me you are making a mountain out of a mole hill - some software or another is adding the tags to the tracks in the first place and besides MP3Tag is ‘free’ anyway and no it’s not irreversible you could quite easily copy the ‘artist’ field to ‘album artist’ later or even duplicate your ‘album artist’ under a different tag identity to restore later. My point though was these things take minutes for a user to do and not hours, even though the process might be lengthy, the user interaction is quite minimal to resolve this somewhat simple tag issue in a users local library compilations folder.

I am with LPG on this point. 

If we roll back a year this was not an issue and you certainly didn’t have to use MP3Tag or similar to play around with tags in order for your compilation alums to display correctly. 

I did see in another post that Sonos were trying to cure a problem with albums with exactly the same name being confused. I don’t know if that was the real reason as I haven’t seen a post from anyone at Sonos clearly laying out the problem they were trying to resolve.

However, it would seem that they have created many more issues for customers by taking the path they have chosen.  I kind of think it would have been easier to explain to a much smaller audience of people that if they hit an issue with albums with duplicate names then that would be the time to step in and change tags to differentiate them. 

It seems that they chose a path that makes every single customer who uses a media library have to take action to correct a problem that didn’t exist prior to May 2024 and that is what is so frustrating and disappointing.

I am also disappointed to note that this was not (and is still not) clearly explained to all customers as to the impact of this change they made and what action customers need to take to resolve the issue. You can see that by the number of times this topic comes up in the forum that many customers are still confused / unaware. 

Can you imagine how many customers would be out off purchasing Sonos if the shop they went to explained that “oh by the way, if you have a media library that contains albums by various artists you have to download a 3rd party application to update the Album Artist Tag on all of them”? 

I’d like to ask what the barrier is, that prevents Sonos from fixing this album fragmentation problem?  Sonos software used to list albums properly before the software crash, iTunes can do it, and apparently MP3Tag can do it.  Sonos knows how it did it previously.  And a key selling feature of Sonos is music library access, which is NOT being delivered.  I really don’t understand from a marketing perspective why Sonos would allow such a major defect to continue — especially since Sonos probably has a major marketing opportunity now with the reported Samsung soundbar software crash.  

I’m not saying Sonos will not resolve this issue eventually, as there were several options to ‘group folders’ in their older S2 App, but was just saying to fix this now yourself is not a mammoth task to group by ‘album artist’ and switch compilations ‘album artist’ tag to read as “various artists” - it resolves the issue immediately. The fix has been awaited for some time and it appears it has not been at the top of the priority list - no doubt it will get resolved at some point, but as stated it’s a fix, or workaround, that takes minutes (not hours) from a user-interaction perspective) and can sort things, at least until Sonos developers get around to resolving the issue. 

Personally speaking, IMV, there are a number of other more important priorities that likely sit above this compilation display issue, which can be resolved by the end-user anyway, by a simple change of the tag field.

BTW,  Anyone thinking of tagging all their compilation albums should be made aware of the impact this has on Artist Search capabilities i.e the individual artist will disappear from the Artist list and will appear as ‘Various Artist’ or however you choose to tag your compilation album.   (the Artist may still appear in the list if you have a separate solo Album in their name but the contents will NOT show the compilation album track by that Artist)  

If you then use try to locate the individual Artist & Track using SEARCH then be aware of the limitations: 

IPAD Version 

    Compilation Artist appears in Artist List = NO

    Compilation Artist appears in Search = YES 

Android Version 

    Compilation Artist appears in Artist List = NO

    Compilation Artist appears in Search = YES 

Windows PC Version 

    Compilation Artist appears in Artist List = NO

    Compilation Artist appears in Search = NO 

Hi ​@Stockbeer et al

Welcome to the Sonos Community!

Sorry to hear of the issue you’ve been having with the metadata on your Music Library. 

I recently came across the following text which explains the whys of the recent changes made:

So, while there have been changes made to how Sonos indexes and catalogues the tracks in your Library, hopefully you will see that the way we do it now is an improvement, even if it takes a bit of tag editing for some users to see things they way they should be seen.

Incidentally, Contributing Artists on a compilation album can now be found listed under the Composers sub-section of Music Library.

I hope this helps.

Corry, 

Can I suggest posting your statement above statement in the “Tips for common Sonos problems Self Help” section?

Also I would love to hear why the designers chose to make 100% of customers resort to tagging their compilation albums (with all its pitfalls noted above) rather than the very simple suggestion of having those who encounter duplicate albums resort to just tagging one of those? 

 E.G in your example someone could just adjust the tag on one of the duplicates as “Unplugged EC” or “Unplugged Clapton”.

I have over 7000 tracks and not a single duplicated album so I cant believe the issue is that widespread so why make 100% of customers spend hours retagging ALL compilation albums and not just the handful of those affected?

Hi ​@Editor 

Well, it’s not really a tip - just an explanation of the thought process behind what we did.

The explanation is in the blue box in my earlier post.

So people would have to incorrectly tag their albums? I would not do that, so I would not ask anyone else to either.

I do understand your concerns, but why would it take anyone hours to adjust the tags on their Music Library?

It can be done in seconds. Literally. Whichever tool you are using, you should be able to highlight all your compilation albums and set all their Album Artist tags to “Various Artists” in one fell swoop. If you can’t do that, you are using the wrong tool.

Personally - and neither Sonos nor I can take any responsibility for anything going awry when using third-party software - I use Media Monkey. It is free and can do what I said above. Why I tend to use it is because it can also embed album art into each music file.

100% of our customers? The vast majority of our customers only use streaming services - they don’t keep Music Libraries. I think it may be considerably over 90%. I am sure you meant 100% of our customers who have Music Libraries. Still, however, it should be a simple matter to tag your compilation albums with Various Artists, and not the hours of work that you allude to.

I hope this helps.

There’s something I’m missing from this explanation. I understand that everyone’s main issue with this seems to be around compilation albums specifically, and not the more general “Artist” tagging issues, but…

There’s an ongoing issue with the artist tag that breaks on the mobile app only, where albums don’t show tracks with guest artists.

My understanding is that:

1. ID3 tagging recommends tagging tracks as “Artist” as “main artist; guest artist” and “Album Artist” as the album artist, allowing an album to be fetched and arranged using the “Album Artist”, Various Artist/Compilation tags are another thing.
2. Every single music player except Sonos mobile respects this, but Sonos mobile gets confused and omits these tracks (so that guest-filled last Ozzy album is reduced to a 3-song EP). Sonos desktop and 3rd-party controllers (and by extension the Sonos firmware, unless Sonos were dumb enough to put all their query logic in the client) can read and identify all the tracks on an album.
3. Many music services (eg. Qobuz) play safe and don’t include guest artists, keeping the artist tagging simple, so this is only an issue for those of us that buy/own music and have to live with the fact that we simply “don’t count”.
4. Sonos introduced a load of tagging bugs last summer that they don’t seem interested in fixing.

Maybe the current “different Sonos music players are inconsistent” approach will be replaced by “we killed that pesky useful working superior desktop app so you have to use Sonos mobile” and then we really will have to “re-tag libraries specifically for Sonos”, but assuming that this set of tagging bugs won’t be fixed (or were actually bugs with the whole Sonos platform up until last summer), an actual “Sonos tagging guide” that isn’t buried in a forum post somewhere would be helpful.