iTunes library not matching sonos library

  • 9 December 2020
  • 4 replies
  • 268 views
K

Couple issues.

The biggest one is updating my Sonos music library to match iTunes library.  Just purchased couple things from iTunes. Did an “Update Music Library” in Sonos - it took a long time to index (only added one album), but when it finished, I can’t find the artist, album anywhere in Sonos library.  HELP???

One other issue.  There are times that I’ve gotten new music and it catalogued perfectly by artist in iTunes but doesn’t show up in Sonos music library by that artist.  I’ve usually been able to locate it by looking through albums, compilations, songs, contributing artist, composing artist or sometimes even genre.  I’ve never understood why Sonos doesn’t always mirror iTunes library.  Any idea why this is? 

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4 replies

J

Hi.  This will be a slightly vague answer because I don’t use anything Apple and so have no incentive to research the detail…  but it might help point you in the right direction.

Apple does things its own way, so Sonos doesn’t mirror iTunes because Apple doesn’t do things the industry standard way, almost as an article of faith.

Sonos will use the tags (metadata) in the music files to index songs in a conventional way - so ultimately if things aren’t coming out as you want then a tag editor is the solution.

There is no uniquely correct way to deal with compilation albums, where different tracks are by different artists.  There are at least two tags you can play around with here - Artist and AlbumArtist.

I draw your attention to the setting in the Sonos app under System, Music Library, Compilation Albums.  One of the options is ‘use iTunes compilations’.  I don’t know if that will address your problems (at least in part), but you may wish to experiment a bit.

I hope that helps.

R
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Hi 

I have 2 x Sonos Play1 which I run off a NAS Drive using Windows 10 and iTunes

I bought these in late 2015 and have struggled ever since. Often it didn’t work at all. Have wasted hours, days of my life on the issue

I had a lightbulb moment recently. Sonos and Windows iTunes are never going to work properly together. So ditch iTunes. I tried other software for my playlists, none of which worked

So I am exporting all of my playlists as m3u files. The files are still in the iTunes folders. The Music Library in Sonos is set to the iTunes Media folder where the m3u files are, while the music tracks are in Music, a sub-folder of iTunes Media. It has never worked better

I am spending far less time on exporting the playlists - and I have about 1,000 - than looking at forums like these or continually updating the music library and seeing that it didn’t work. I’ve done about 600 so far. Music added to iTunes will also be added when updating Sonos, and any new or amended playlists can be exported as m3u files

And whatever Apple do to iTunes - and I think one could subscribe to the theory that they want to make it as difficult as possible - I will now be independent of them, because I’m not using the iTunes Library File which is the root of the problem

Heaven!

 

J

Those of us with locally stored music have a variety of ways of managing that music for Sonos.

I have never used iTunes.  My music is stored in a simple folder structure on a NAS.  I am not a great user of playlists, but the ones I do have are created as Sonos playlists.  No playlists created outside of Sonos at all.

That won’t be right for everyone, but it could not be simpler.

K

Appreciate your feedback folks!

I guess I should count myself among the fortunate of us.  I’ve been using sonos on my pc with a pretty big iTunes library for over six years with great success — other than the occasional cataloguing problem.

it’s just the two iTunes purchases I made the other day that haven’t updated from iTunes that’s a problem.  At first I thought maybe it was because of the 65K sonos limit but I only have 557 albums so nowhere near the threshold.

anyone else have iTunes purchase not transferring over to sonos?

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