I recently bought a new MAC and updated to S2 in Sonos. My music library consisted of CDs that I ripped into iTunes and LPs that I digitized and downloaded into iTunes. All these wma4 files are kept in one main folder on an external hard drive. I was able to connect S2 to the library but the songs that I digitized myself are not connected to their artists or to their album titles; there’s just a long list of songs that are listed alphabetically. What do I have to do to get S2 to recognize the tracks in the format that I need to make them playable in a useful way? I’ve contacted both Apple and Sonos Tech Support but neither of them were any help, both saying that it wasn’t their problem.
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It’s most likely a tagging problem. Not sure if there’s a version of mp3tag that works on a Mac, but I’d be looking pretty strongly at those tags. Find just one that’s missing that data, and do a “get info” on it. There should be a list of tags (I’m not at home on my Mac to look at specific details, sorry) including the album art associated with the file.
I’m guessing that when you transferred the data from your old mac to the new one, somehow those tags were munged in some way. It might be just as easy to re-open the new “Music” app, and let it find all the files, and re-associate them. I seem to recall there was an “import” under the library menu (?), and maybe a “turn on Genius” or something like that, which *may* do a lot of those re-associations for you? Once you’ve done that, I think there’s an “export playlists” or “export library” function that sends all the appropriate links to an .xml file that most other apps, including Sonos, can read.
The MP3Tag program, which I have used before on my Windows machine, allows you to manually “fix” all of those tags, either individually or in groups of your choosing.
The Sonos app, like most music apps, uses those tags to help categorize and display all the pertinent infomation about each piece.
To the best of my knowledge (which may be imperfect) S2 handles the file indexing identically to S1.
In every case I have seen on here where library file indexing has ‘gone wrong’, the problem has been in the file metadata. I would suggest you take a look at the metadata for Artist, AlbumArtist and Album on a couple of the files. (Although those are MP3-ID3 tag names, not sure if WMA tags are the same.)
Certainly Sonos has zero ability to “write” to those files. It reads them, and stores the links to them in it’s own system, but doesn’t change the originating file. So any “munging” that may have occurred would have been part of the copy process from one machine to the other. I certainly agree, as John B says, I’m pretty sure there’s been zero change in the process of how Sonos deals with that between S1 and S2. It would have been an odd thing to do. However, Apple has significantly changed the way it exposes that data, no longer using the industry standard .xml file.
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