Last year after much debate I spent the time to update ALL the tags on my compilation albums
(with Album Artist = Various Artists)
to overcome the annoying issue of all compilation albums or albums with guest artists becoming fragmented.
Although I didn't (and still don't agree) with Sonos’s approach to the underlying problem of albums with identical names becoming combined I realised that there was no indication of a change in policy so I made the edits and re-catalogued everything.
Compilation albums were then represented correctly as one album with the downside being that the contributing artists no longer appeared in the artists view.
(I didn't agree with the Sonos solution because they could have just restricted the solution to the handful of people who suffered the issue and make them update the tags on just the duplicate titled albums rather than make every media library users update tags on their albums in perpetuity. The Sonos CEO office have been unable to explain their logic to choosing the solution they did which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever - what sort of company imposes this workload on their user base for ever??)
I know that the CEO was made aware of this issue but they seem to have chosen to ignore it.
ANYWAY….
imagine my surprise that after updating the app & system recently the fragmented albums problem has resurfaced again. My compilation and ‘guest’ albums are now completely fragmented and each show up 10 to 20 times in the album view depending on how many tracks there are.
This problem resurfaced after upgrading the app when the APP release notes stated something like “For Android: Albums can now be grouped by Compilations or Album Artist (or left ungrouped), and folders can be sorted by Song Name, Song Number, or File Name.”
I tried flipping the “group by” setting in the IPad version as the android version didn’t seem to have the option which was odd despite the version in the app being reported as the latest (perhaps they are releasing that feature in waves as they now tend to do) and changing the setting and re-cataloging the library makes no difference.
3 Questions:
Has anyone seen a detailed explanation as to how this ‘Album group’ feature is supposed to work?
Do other Android users with the version below see the new “group” option in Media Library options?
Why does owning a Sonos system come with so much work every time they change the app?
(This problem has been reported to Sonos Support)
System = 92.0.71170
Android App = 80.35.4... 20251204
IPad app = 80.35.8
PC app = 17.2.2
