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Hi, I’m a newbie here and new to Sonos. I’ve been using Logitech Media Server (LMS) for music at home until recently.

I have a big library of MP3 files that I want to copy to a NAS drive that I have just installed on my home network. That’s all working fine and I can index some initial test content OK in the Sonos Music Library.

I can see that Music Library has fewer options to configure than LMS had around how the music is presented - particulary over compilation albums and multi-disc albums. I obviously want to minimise the amount of re-tagging that I have to do and would welcome advice.

I found a thread on here about compilation albums and it seems I can’t rely on the COMPILATION=1 tag that I had used in LMS, and instead need to use ALBUMARTIST set to “Various Artists” along with other settings about how albums are grouped to achieve the same effect. I’ve got that working OK and it will need a fair bit of re-tagging of my content but that’s OK.

The one I’m not seeing an easy way round is where I’ve used the DISCNUMBER tag to separate out the separate discs of a multi-disc album. Within LMS there’s an option to use that tag to present them as separate albums which really helps with navigation (some box sets have a very large number of discs!). Any recommendations about how to handle this? Is the only option to tag each separate disc’s content as if it was a single album?

Thanks in anticipation.

Hi @Quest82 

Welcome to the Sonos Community!

Apologies for the delay - I’ve been trying to find a) documentation on this and b) someone who just knew. Unfortunately, I was able to find neither.

In my own library, however, I did find an album that had the DISCNUMBER tag and noticed that while the DISCNUMBER value was never displayed in the Sonos app, the tracks were organised such that disc 2 follows disc 1 and so forth. This results in discs being played in the right order, but there is no way to browse each disc individually - the entire disc set shows as one entry, with all tracks from all discs listed in sequence.

So, to separate the discs for easy navigation, you would need to manually add the disc number to the Album title with a metadata editor, I think.

I hope this answers your question.

Hi Corry,

Thanks for the reply and no problem about the slight delay!

I had come to the same conclusions myself through a bit of testing. I wanted to be sure how the Music Library operated before embarking on a large amount of retagging, so good to have it confirmed.

I guess it doesn’t matter for an album that only has two discs - it wouldn’t be a huge problem there because, as you say it plays the tracks in the correct order. But there are some albums I have (boxed sets) that have the equivalent of 12 or more discs so they obviously pose greater navigational challenges with the way they are presented! As I go through adding the content I’ll take a view on it case by case and separate them out using different Album Titles if I think I need to...

Thanks again!

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