Local Library Search - Some Positive Suggestions

Similar, but not identical, setup and symptoms.

Local library stored on Synology NAS. All MP3s, obsessively tagged, about 25K tracks, 2K albums.

For the past few weeks, since the 7th May enhancements, access to my library has been erratic at best and impossible on many occasions. As of yesterday, 28th July, I find I can now reliably access and play my library from anywhere in the house.

Search works, sort of. I have many recordings (~20) of Bach's Goldberg Variations. Searching does find them but I have absolutely no way of distinguishing one from the others. The album title is too long for Sonos app to display, so they all get truncated. The search results don't scroll so that's no help. There's no album art so I can't tell from that.

Browsing is not clear in my mind yet. If I browse in Albums, the search prompt disappears (as it does in Artists etc.) I have to back out of Albums to search and then I get Artists, Albums, Composers etc who happen to fit the string. Someone like Scott Walker or Led Zeppelin who released multiple Albums using the Artist name as the Album Title is a nightmare if you can't filter the search by tag type.

Browsing Albums with Album Artist set as Various Artists is mad! Take '60 Number Ones Of The Sixties'. I have 60 separate entries in Albums for that album! Tapping on any one entry changes the display but doesn't say which Track or Artist it may be assigned to. It's just blank.

Oh dear. Sonos has still got a lot of repair work to do, both to the app and to customers' relationships.

My apologies, @Walter Eagle , I have only just caught up with this little corner of the chaotic rabbit-hole this forum has become. 

From reading your post, I would guess that you were unknowingly "upgraded" to the latest firmware on your speakers by the automatic upgrade "feature" in the app.  I'm not sure what the new Version number is but I have very carefully avoided having it installed and my speakers are on OS2 Version 79.1-54060. 

The awful multi-entry listing of albums with different Artist tags seems to be down to that upgrade and the different way the tag data in the local library is now handled. I can't bring myself to search for the relevant post, but Sonos have acknowledged that it is a problem and that they are working on it. They do not, however, have a ETA for any fix. 

I don't know whether it would appeal to you but, as a fellow obsessive tagger, you may like to try an app called BubbleUPnP which I use on Android and may also be on iOS if that's your preference. It reads from the data tables which are saved to each of your speakers when Sonos indexes your library and shows you exactly what metadata Sonos is working from for every track in your library and how it may be different to what you have in your tags. It has a very fast search facility which looks at the entire strings of whatever set of tags you are looking at and, while I have not yet got beyond having it play on the tablet I use, I am sure that with a little bit of experimentation I could get it to play on my Sonos speakers. 

This may be of academic interest to you, but at least by using it to see what the Sonos indexing process has done to your tags you may be able to understand a bit more about what's going on back there on your speakers. Oh, and if/when you do play something through BubbleUPnP your album art shows up again!

Hope this helps, and good luck

John

John

First of all thank you very much indeed for the very detailed and relevant response. It's like a model of customer service that a certain company we both know could learn from.

It hadn't actually crossed my mind that SONOS might have altered the metadata in my MP3s. Read it, yes I hope so. Interpret it correctly, essential. Add some new metadata, OK reluctantly, that's what the file space is there for. But change and overwrite the existing data?! No, no, no. I don't think that's at all acceptable.

I had assumed SONOS coders had failed to communicate with each other. One lot were working off Album Artist for sorting, and another lot were working off Track Artist. And in this case the merged code produced rubbish. So I was hoping it was simply a matter of misinterpreting metadata, rather than mangling it intentionally.

I won't have a chance to verify what's happened, or explore Bubble, for the next week or so, but I'll certainly give it some attention ASAP.

Thanks again - much appreciated.

 This is not going to help with compilation albums which should be tagged as described above.  Hopefully Sonos will fix that.  Because I’m a big fan of classical music the tagging of my albums is a little more involved.  What I learned years ago was to make sure the Artist & Album Artist tags were exactly the same ( in my case the last name of the composer ).  Also when an album has, for example, two composers I make them into two albums.  So Shostakovich: Symphony No. 4 & Sibelius: Violin Concerto become two different albums with the Album names Symphony No. 4 & Violin Concerto.  So far this has worked with all software I have used.  With Sonos my compilations are messed up, but at least I have no classical compilations because of the tagging described.

Hi MoPac

I understand your workaround, and I'm pleased that it works for you.

But, oh dear, I could never persuade myself to use these methods. I guess that's just a measure of how inflexible I am! And, thanks to SONOS, I end up suffering as a result.

There is already a recognised MP3 tag at Track level named Composer. And that is the only place I will write the composer's name for my classical tracks. (I used the same field for composers/songwriters of jazz, blues, rock and all other genres.) The Artist tag only ever contains the artist's name - i.e. the performer. There are a few occasions in my classical files where the Composer IS the Artist (e.g. I have some tracks with Benjamin Britten playing on a recording of his own Cello Sonata) but most commonly the content of these fields is different. Does your method mean you end up with some guy called Ludwig von Beethoven listed as the Artist on his pieces? Wow! Imagine listening to Beethoven or Bach as solo Artists! Sorry, that's all wrong by me.

What happens to the actual performer if you put the composer in the Artist field? I have about 20 recordings of Bach's Goldberg Variations by different keyboard players. Using your method, how would I distinguish them if every artist ends up as Bach? Seriously, if there's another trick I'm open to learning.

Anyway, this isn't solving the problem that is SONOS. At best it's a workaround to accommodate their shortcomings. Thanks for the input - we all need to help one another from the unwieldy caricature of user unfriendly experience that this app has become.

Walter Eagle:

 I never used the Composer tag because when I started all this local library stuff most software had no search category for Composer.  Usually I rely on the album cover or liner notes to see who the artists are.

 I used ROON for a year and spent hours putting photos of all participants who were involved in a particular composition into the ROON feature allowing that.  You can imagine the work involved for operas.  So what made this slick was the fact you could have ROON cycle through all the photos of the artists while listening.  Then the nutcakes at ROON changed the format from 16 by 9 to round.  Well I dumped them after that.

The whole tech world is conspiring against us!

Surely there's a market out there of people with local libraries who want to listen to their music. And they'd like software to allow them to enhance that experience, either finding and selecting the music, or to supplement the listening. Can it be that hard?

More likely, it's not that profitable. What do you bet SONOS will eventually become streaming only, for which they will charge a subscription, with zero or poor support for listeners being in possession of their own music. Actually, that's almost where we are now.

 At the point where it becomes paid streaming only I’ll be done with Sonos.  I have several other options in house now.  The only reason I hang onto Sonos now is Dolby Atmos for orchestral music.  Even with Atmos via Sonos the gapless performance is not perfect, but the stage is so much bigger.

It’s a shame you can’t get Sonos to use Minimserver for indexing, much more powerful. Neither Sonos or Apple seem to support tagging properly which is painful for non-standard ‘albums’. 

Like you say though, they don’t seem to care about local music, although I also don’t see why they’d care that much more about streaming as they won’t get anything from Apple/Google/Spotify etc… either, so keeping the local music crowd happy surely has to help retain people at least. 

What they get from supporting streaming from Apple/Google/Spotify is access to the vast majority of consumers who use streaming services. If Sonos didn’t support them, they would be dead in the water.

Like it or not, digital downloads and local libraries are a dying breed with a market share even smaller than physical media now.

 I don’t think they will ever seek out servers like MinimServer etc.  Totally different approach to music streaming.  Bluesound uses the same share concept and will probably also never change to working with a server.

 I did, however, use Bubble UPnP Server on a Windows PC to make my Sonos Port an Open Home device and can now use the Linn app to stream from MinimServer.  UPnP is also an option, but it’s not gapless like Open Home.

I think Lenbrook would much prefer you to buy a BlueSound Vault than open blueos to dlna servers 😂

Curiously NAD are releasing a network player that isn’t BlueOS based, supports Spotify Connect, Tidal Connect, Apple AirPlay 2, Google Chromecast, DLNA, Roon and is only £299, which seems a bit low for NAD.

I wish OpenHome had taken off with Linn making it open. For me a bugbear with upnp was the queue being per control point side, rather than per device. OpenHome fixed that flaw.

I suspect the biggest headache for Sonos opening up upnp support is available tags becomes even more uncontrolled. ReadyMedia/Minidlna is pretty basic in the tags it makes available, I use Asset rather than Minim, but with both the catalogue tree can be customised. Then there is the various random NAS implementations.

By keeping the tag extract and catalogue server within the devices, in theory they control end-to-end from extraction to presentation so can keep it consistent. It seems they’re unable to understand how to make it work though.

@Walter Eagle 

Surely there's a market out there of people with local libraries who want to listen to their music. And they'd like software to allow them to enhance that experience, either finding and selecting the music, or to supplement the listening. Can it be that hard?

I still have a local library, but in reality it is used as more and more as a backup for when my internet connection is down than my primary source. Almost everything I have on it I can just stream. The last few CDs I bought I haven’t even ripped and put on my NAS yet because Qobuz have them all. Even the digital downloads from the Qobuz store I have downloaded and stored, I usually stream.

A large part of my listening is also transient. Streaming gives me access to far more music than I could ever buy or even want to buy. There will be things I listen to for a month or two this year, because they are right, but it’s not something I ever want to keep or listen to in the future.

Last.FM used to find me all sorts of out of the ordinary things I liked back when I started with Sonos ZP80/100 scobbling to it. Over time it got worse though.

While technically it isn’t that difficult to take a clean data set about the tracks, the data set of what you have listened to and a data set of what other people listen to and generate recommendations, it’s not going to give the greatest results without a lot of intervention and people who have insight into context and why someone who likes track A from artist X might also like track B from artist Y.

At a high level it would work, but it misses the more complex connections that are rarely logical. Music is emotional, situational, a memory, a mood change. From one album to the next as I listen I will often have a complete change in genre, mood, tempo, sound. Without understanding the context of why I like something it’s going to be tricky to predict good fits for the next thing.

 I favor local library access because most of my music is classical orchestral and is easier to search for because of the way I tag classical.  Also I have several pieces that are not available on streaming services.  There is slightly better quality streaming local rather than the cloud.  Granted I can’t tell that much difference using Sonos speakers, but with my higher end system there is a difference.

Yes, this is the why the math for a local library numbering in the 10s of thousands of tracks no longer works. By the time you filter down to rare tracks not available on streaming that you’re planning to listen to enough times to justify the manual labour and infrastructure investment required to curate them, you arrive at a very small number of tracks. That number probably measures in the 100s.

@edmountain 

I'm old enough to have lived through several incarnations of recorded media. Vinyl (first time round), CDs, MP3s etc. Each time I chose to embrace the next technology, it wasn't because the previous medium player stopped doing what I wanted. Turntables still went round, CDs still shone their lasers … I made the choice based on personal reasons and preferences.

Eventually, before streaming sources emerged, I decided to rip all my many CDs and use the ripped audio files as my source, plus subsequent downloads that I continued purchasing. I selected SONOS to deliver that music to me.

Now I find I may be in a position where my MP3s and SONOS really don't work well together. I may have to alter my listening technology yet again - but this time it's been forced on me by SONOS.

Quite frankly, I don't want to change. I like my music. I'm so old I don't want to explore strange new genres, seek out weird artists, and boldly go where my ears have never been before. If I were younger I'd kick my SONOS equipment out the door in a heartbeat. But I'd have to spend silly money to replace it and I just don't see me getting value from any equipment for the years I have left. Obviously an individual with no investment in a music collection (financial or emotional) and with many more years of listening to come wouldn't reach the same conclusion as me.

But why oh why did SONOS have to remove or disable functionality while claiming it to be an upgrade or advance? 

That makes sense, especially as there isn’t really a good source of online data, free or paid, to use for comprehensive tagging.

I’m curious to see what Samsung/Harman do with Roon, so drop in and out of their forum. There have been some positive steps already. A big gripe is still the state of meta data added to peoples libraries. When you consider Roon use both paid and volunteer crowd-sourced providers and it is still lacking, manual tagging is the only way to really get what you want.

High quality metadata and tagging is a resource intensive data entry and fact cross checking process. Labels generally aren’t going to dedicate spending money and staff time for more than the bare minimum.
As the number of people with local libraries dwindles, even crowd-sourcing ends up limited in scope. Some people who in the early days helped build up the free online sources are less willing when it’s becoming mostly used by commercial companies who then just sell it back to them rather than help contribute.

Exactly my thinking. But, if you have already spent hours curating and invested in infrastructure for local library, its harder to make the decision to remove files or turn off completely, as you are reminding yourself all the time and money you spent ‘building’ the local library.

I decided to ditch my local library a couple of years ago, even though I had invested considerable time in importing and tagging. It had its time and place.

I used Spotify initially, but then moved to Apple Music, my playlists migrated with Song Shifter.

All playlists now managed in Apple Music, they are with me all the time, and can easily be shared.

Shazam occasionally used to add a track to playlists on the move, that I can then listen to when at home.

I wonder in some ways if this is the space ‘outside of the home’ Sonos are thinking of as referenced on the recent call… The irony for me here is that in order to use Sonos to manage playlists across different providers outside the home for use on say Sonos headphones, you need the ability to edit an effing queue or playlist easily which doesn’t appear to be a core function of the new experience! 

It would also make local libraries stand out as a bit of a sore thumb as serving those over the internet via a speaker would presumably require a bit more oomph than some older speakers have. 

I still use my local library a lot as I listen to music quite a bit in the car, and use wireless CarPlay which gives lossless audio, unlike bluetooth connections. So my local library is effectively shared between Apple Music, Sonos and Minimserver which drives my Naim streamer for ‘serious’ listening. I can also feed the Naim with a Port which works well. 

Having music on my phone in the car is a big plus as I don’t have to worry about patchy connectivity and variable quality. 

I also prefer to buy an album if I really like it still as more money ends up in the hands of those who deserve it. Streaming is however a great way to explore new stuff. 

I am aware however that much of this puts me in a minority … 

I can't argue with your personal choices regarding how you curate music. That's completely up to you.

But from the perspective of Sonos, considering that they are a for-profit business it's no surprise that they're focusing on the market segment that's growing rather than the segment which is shrinking.