I suggest Sonos’ new marketing slogan: “Sonos - you bought the system…SO Now you work for US!  Sonos!”
 

A simple solution:  Sonos should program the software to offer a choice of “Group by Album Name”, along with other choices like iTunes Compilation, et al. or even “Group by Album Artist Name”.  It can’t be hard to program the capability to easily group by one metatag instead of another, and giving users the choice.  The Sonos solution of retagging all the data erases the original artist data.  I don’t know understand why Sonos keeps claiming it does not.  Users in the comments above confirm that, well, changing the metatag means the data is changed. (Sonos is basically organizing its software on the premise that the artists don’t matter and music is a total commodity -  a very weird position for a company marketing to music lovers.) 

Most of all, it’s impossible to understand why, after the software crash, Sonos would want to still cause the users to have to do all this retagging and erasure - with third party software, yet! - and spend even more time and effort to get the Sonos system to work in a user-friendly way.   

Do new customers really understood that Sonos' claim that it can play one’s music library is effectively untrue?   Would they still buy if they knew it?  Is Sonos really hoping for good word-of-mouth referrals from irritated customers? 

Why is Sonos rigidly stuck on some purist engineer’s idea that users must reorganize their extensive libraries to confirm to Sonos choices - instead of satisfying customers with a user-friendly solution?  

The user’s time matters.  It really does.  The idea that it will only take minutes, not hours, for an average user like me  - not a software engineer like the Sonos rep answering the questions - to get the library to work, is first to find this third party software and figure out if it’s on a reliable site or if it’s malware, THEN learn how it works, and THEN immediately, without spending a lot of time testing it, and with high confidence, set it on automatic to alter ALL my library data, is so bizarre, maybe it should be Sonos new marketing slogan.  “Sonos - you bought the system, so now you work for US!”

Really, I just don’t get it.  Is this all some ironic anti-marketing campaign?  

The solution actually seems pretty simple and uncomplicated.  Sonos could simply have the choice of organizing by album, actually use the Album Title tag as the organizing tag, instead of artist data.  Then the album would be listed as a single consolidated item, and any confusion over “compilations” and differing artists would also be resolved, since it would all be subordinate to the album title.  If the concern is about the occasional duplicate album, the user could either delete them, or change the tile to “xxx (Duplicate)” to keep it without harming any of the artist metadata; this would also have benefit of retaining the duplicate as a clear separate item, still included on the album list, and chooseable to play separately from the original.  
 

it’s also hard to see why this change couldn't be reprogrammed easily and quickly.  It’s just substituting one tag for another as the priority organizing data.  

Having read this thread and thinking behind the change, I’m still unable to wrap my head around the logic.

The system worked fine before the firmware update. My music library works perfectly in Windows Media Player, this scenario of clashing album names is just bizarre and I would suggest remote for most users. It’s almost certain everyone with a music library will have at least one compilation album. Why is it only Sonos seemed to found this as an issue and no other software/system provider see it?

As per others requesting, give us a new option to group our albums by album title. Then for anyone with the clashing album names they are still happy, meanwhile the vast majority of us with music library can get it working normally again.

Hi ​@Monkster 

Welcome to the Sonos Community!

Well, while you may not have personally noticed it, it did not work fine before the update - any albums with the same title were amalgamated under one album. For example, if you had more than one Unplugged album (there are a few, after all), they would have appeared as one single album, which is less than ideal. The change in how we index albums has improved this.

I hope this helps.

?  Sorry, I don’t understand.  Are you saying there is a more recent update that does resolve the compilation album problem?  So that compilation albums can be played?  Right now, if I try to play a compilation album, in the Sonos app, I still just get three dots underneath the title, and a notice that it is a compilation and can’t be played.  So the title is working correctly a lot of the time and does group the tracks together —but your player STILL WON’T ALLOW THE TRACKS TO PLAY apparently due to some problem, unique to Sonos since the big update, with allowing the differing album artist and artist meta tags.  (The recommended Sonos solution of editing the artist metatags so they all read the same is ridiculous for a music company to recommend, that we basically erase the artist data!!!). Sonos seems to be focused instead on the smaller but also annoying problem about how a single album can be listed as all separate tracks - also unsolved by you.  HOW HARD CAN IT BE TO LOOK AT HOW YOUR PROGRAM WORKED CORRECTLY BEFORE THE PROBLEM UPDATE, AND THEN ADJUST THE NEW CODE TO WORK THE SAME WAY,  You do have a model for how it should work.  Or you should remove the claim about playing music libraries off your advertising, because it is basically false.  

Note there is no change required for the ‘Artist’ tag - that field remains unique for each of the tracks on the compilation album. It’s the ‘Album Artist’ tag that needs to be the same and have the folder grouping set to ..by Album Artist. The compilations should then display/work fine in the App - so no need to change the Artist tag at all.

Hope that helps to clear the mist.

Hi ​@LPG 

It was done to stop the occurrence of the exact issue that the person who started this thread is having:

​@Ken_Griffiths has it right - you are adding information, not replacing it.

I’m sorry - I don’t understand this report. Could you please describe or show screenshots of what you are doing in order to see this message, please? Thanks.

The bigger question for me is still why on earth did Sonos Engineering take the approach that 100% of people with compilation albums in their Library should have to fiddle about with tagging rather than just those people who suffered from the duplicate album issue? 

All it would take is for those with duplicates to add details to one of the duplicates to distinguish the album (if they were even bothered by it and I get that some people would be). 

Corry , I know you answered this point in another thread but I disagree with your comment that it would be “corrupting” the album / artist on one of the albums if you took this approach but I don’t see it that way at all.  I regard it that you would simple be choosing to add appropriate distinguishing details to the Album / Artist name.

I wrote to the SONOS CEO about this and asked him to get the engineers to explain to him why they chose to make 100% of customers make tagging changes rather than just the much smaller percentage who were affected / care about duplicate album names and get back to me with his response. 

If he ever gets around to responding I’ll post his response here.  (or perhaps Corry you might encourage him to post his reply here .   ) 

Hi ​@Editor 

Compilation albums were showing as separate albums for each track on it. There may well have been another way to approach this - I have not delved into the mechanics of it personally.

I am not sure what you mean here, nor what I said - could you please provide a link?

If his reply is to you, I will never see it. You can post a reply here when you get it, though.

Edit: I misread what you said. I have never met or communicated with him.