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I’ve been a (mostly) happy Sonos S1 user for 20 years now. I recently decided to take the plunge by refreshing and expanding my system and moving to S2. Right now, I am thrilled with my new products and the quality of the sound that I have throughout my home.

BUT I had no idea what I was getting into. The app, the app …

That said, I get that Sonos is in a deep hole and I want to be patient and continue to have a happy relationship with my sound system.

SO, here is my current topic/question: I usually use music services but I also appreciate my local music library. It is mostly FLAC and partly non-FLAC. I like having the Album Art, I wish I had Artist Art, and I want my compilation albums to be properly indexed by Album and Song Artist within album.

From trying various things, this in my current understanding:

  • iTunes is out for me because they do not support FLAC
  • Artist Art is out because Sonos expects to get it from the iTunes server
  • I have Album Art included as jpg’s in the album folders and that displays just fine. Except…
  • Except for compilation albums. With my first non-iTunes I got an instance of the album (with art) for each unique artist on the album (eg, Blondie and Pat Benatar made an album called Back to Back Hits. My index has two albums with the same name - one from Blondie and one from Pat Benatar - I can live with that, but most of the albums are out of control).
  • I tried the advice found here and tried modifying the metadata in the song files of one album so that the Album Artist field is now the Album Name (on every song). This combined the separate instances - so I have one album for America’s Greatest Hits. Lovely! But none of the songs show up in the Artist Index. (I have only one song by Boston and I can’t find it unless I remember the name or remember the album that it is in...)

Thank you for your patience if you got this far. I am just throwing it out there in the hopes that someone can toss back some insights/tidbits that might help me with any of these issues.

 

As far as I’m aware, the Sonos system doesn’t get anything at all from iTunes (actually, Apple Music). It has always grabbed any local data directly from the locally stored music, and not from any application that ‘ripped’ or ‘downloaded’ it. So if Sonos ever showed any Artist Art, it would have been stored in the meta data of the file. To my knowledge, though, Sonos has only shown Album Art. 

It sounds to me, if I understand the rest of your post, that Sonos is grabbing the correct information that your system has stored in the meta data. 

However, I’m not sure I understand the issue you’re experiencing with the Boston song, it sounds like it might be the meta data has been messed with? I’d likely call Sonos Support directly to discuss it.

When you speak directly to the phone folks, they have tools at their disposal that will allow them to give you advice specific to your network and Sonos system.

Thanks so much, Bruce.

First, my library is, indeed, ripped cd’s from my collection. It’s stuff from back in the day. I don’t have to have it… I just want it.

On the Boston song, I was just trying to say that it seems that I have to choose between having a compilation indexed as an album OR have the songs indexed so that when I look for any individual artist I will see all of the songs for that artist - including the ones in compilation albums.

I agree on the Sonos support idea and I will do that. It’s just that I am hoping someone in the community can give me clues to understand how the indexing software works that Sonos Support won't know or won’t be able to share with me. Sometimes users like us are able to figure it out by observing what happens.

Cheers, and thanks again.

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