I’m sure most of you have already figured this out, but the “workaround“ is to make certain that every “artist“ listed for every track is exactly the same. If one cares who the artist is for a specific song on a compilation album, you have to type it in with the song title.

A year ago I was considering getting a smart Sonos speaker, but this seems ridiculous in the face of a company/programmers who are not smart! 

So they are now in the final month of their stated improvement plan*, and there is still so much wrong with the current mobile app. I still just use the Windows version, which enables me to better manage the queue, but it’s still problematic.  How do you think they are doing?

*”July and August:

• Improving the stability when adding new products
• Implementing Music Library configuration, browse, search, and play

August and September:

• Improving Volume responsiveness
• User interface improvements based on customer feedback
• Improving overall system stability and error handling

September:

• Improving the reliability of Alarm consistency and reliability

September and October:

• Restoring edit mode for Playlists and the Queue
• Improving functionality in settings”

The New Sonos App and Future Feature Updates | Sonos

I reported this when it first happened and indeed I was told I was the first to raise this error. It was indeed back in July. I sent Sonos detailed analysis of the problem with supporting data and screenshots, all of which I still have. I even had a Sonos tech fiddling around in my library for two hours who confimed that they’d never seen this corruption before. I got a call back to tell me that they were working on a solution but since then nothing. Looks like those of us with large personal libraries who don’t stream much are of low interest to Sonos. Looks like just buying the kit doesn’t generate enough revenue to cover the C level salaries.

True enough, but that’s a lot of work for 5000 albums and it wasn’t even a problem three months ago.

It’s absolutely insane.

Also there is valuable information in the track artist info. One would be crazy to get rid of it just to work around this bug. If one were to nuke that info, then a compilation album would have no artist info at all.

 I wouldn’t mess with compilation tags particularly if I had a lot of them.  Sonos, though they are slow, will fix that issue.

Could someone remove the “answered” flag from this post. A seemingly simple bug came in months ago, and there has been nothing from Sonos in all this time? This crushingly terrible bug had been with us for months, and no progress at all?

Hi @robokitty 

No. As it stands, that is currently the Best Answer (note that it does not say “solution”) out of all those given here. There are no steps you can take to resolve this (short of altering all of your metadata, but I would not consider that a resolution), so there will be no better answers until this is resolved.

Consider - If I did as you asked, anyone new to this thread would not necessarily see my announcement that we are aware of the issue and assume that it is something that they might be able to work around, thus wasting their time and causing frustration - probably more frustration than you get while looking at that Best Answer that you’re not happy with.

When the issue is resolved, the announcement posted here saying as much will become the new Best Answer.

I hope this helps.

 Why is this so difficult when the older firmware handled compilations correctly?  This from a guy that never listens to compilations.

Can we have a ‘least worst answer’ tag? 

Keep in mind that it is not just ‘compilations’.  Single-artist albums with different guest performers (‘contributing artists’) are also ripped apart.  But, yeah:  just put everything within the same album title/album artist together in one ‘album’, where the ‘album artist’ for ‘compilations’ would be ‘Various Artists’. while the ‘contributing artist’ acknowledges each track performer.  Agreed:  why is this so difficult?

Hi @MoPac 

I don’t know. In addition, I have been declaring this issue to be one of the biggest issues currently standing to anyone who will listen to me - I have been trying!

Note that the majority of updates so far have been to the app - this particular issue will require a speaker firmware update to fix. For all I know, a fix might already be in place for the next firmware update that is being made available - I certainly hope so, anyway.

Personally, I have managed to entirely bypass this issue by having .m3u playlists for each album I have (my library practices pre-date any kind of music library scanning that I think started with Windows Media Player (or maybe iTunes, I suppose)). So, instead of going to Albums and seeing all the duplicates, I go to Playlists and see a playlist for each Album, with no repetition:

Still no album art, unfortunately.

I hope this helps.

Bottom line is this....Sonos continues to suck.  They rushed to get a new app out which destroyed a lot of functionality.  Now it seems the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction where they are being overly cautious before rolling out updates.  Regardless...there has been ZERO communication about status for months.  I've got a lot of money invested in my sonos system, but they are sending a very clear signal that they don't care about their customers.  Time to start looking for a new system.

Hi @Barry McCockinner 

The opening post on the following page has been updated with each and every release:

https://en.community.sonos.com/productUpdates/show?id=6896801&title=new-sonos-app-update

In addition:

You are correct if you are saying that we have not been bombarding people with emails - not everyone is affected negatively by the new app, and these would be rather unwelcome, I feel.

You could not be more wrong - we (plural, the staff) care very much. But, I doubt I’m going to convince you of this in a couple of sentences.

Corry:  Is there a way those of us are waiting for a legit fix to the “compilations problem” could put our name on a list to get an email letting us know when the fix has happened?  Thanks.

 For all you classical music lovers, there are a few of you left, make all your Artist & Album Artist  tags ( or whatever your tagging software chooses to call them ) the last name of the composer.  You’ll never have search issues again.

 Use the album cover to see who else was involved in the performance.  Of course Sonos needs to give us those album covers back.

I'm not looking for high level communications from execs about not taking a bonus. That's typical damage control communications. The tutorial and faq are also not a real comm.  The trello board is probably the only useful thing there, so I'll take a look at that.

And.no need to try and convince me that that staff cares...I'm sure you do for a number of reasons, including the loss of revenue that eventually translates into loss of jobs.  You guys care...it's the execs that are questionable.

Hi @RayBob 

If you subscribe to this thread, that will suffice (assuming you have notifications for when a thread you are subscribed to is marked with a Best Answer on).

Click your user icon on the black bar at the top of this page, then Settings, then Notifications to see these notifications settings.

I hope this helps.

Yeah that’s great, but:

I use album artist “Classical” and track artist for whatever. I may be dumb, but I have hundreds of classical albums carefully tagged this way. Just for sonos!

Also, if I have an compilate where every track is really by a different artist, I can’t do this. So a 10 CD set of hits from the 70’s may show as hundreds of “albums”. It’s not a solution to erase all artist names and replace them with “a bunch of people on a compilation all named the same thing to work around a new sonos bug”.

It’s a good tip, but it won’t work for everyone.

Hi @MoPac 

I don’t know. In addition, I have been declaring this issue to be one of the biggest issues currently standing to anyone who will listen to me - I have been trying!

Note that the majority of updates so far have been to the app - this particular issue will require a speaker firmware update to fix. For all I know, a fix might already be in place for the next firmware update that is being made available - I certainly hope so, anyway.

Personally, I have managed to entirely bypass this issue by having .m3u playlists for each album I have (my library practices pre-date any kind of music library scanning that I think started with Windows Media Player (or maybe iTunes, I suppose)). So, instead of going to Albums and seeing all the duplicates, I go to Playlists and see a playlist for each Album, with no repetition:

Still no album art, unfortunately.

I hope this helps.

I have thousands of albums in my library. make a playlist for each one? That doesn’t sound like a good idea… It would probably save me time and money to quit my current programming job and see if I can get a temp job fixing this one bug for Sonos. I suspect if this were the top bug with customers that Sonos would have at least one person working on it full time, and even better more than one person. I’ve never heard of a high priority bug anywhere that took a team multiple months to fix.

I’m all for letting Sonos do their thing and release a fix when it’s ready, but it’s hard to trust anything at this point.

 I’m only suggesting this for classical music.  I’ll leave compilations alone and wait for Sonos to fix the firmware.

  For all classical albums I make the Genre tag “Classical”.  When I search for Brahms I want the list of all the compositions I have that Brahms penned presented as separate albums.  The Artist tag is Brahms & the Album Artist tag is Brahms.  The screenshot is from a search for Brahms using the Artist category.

One other minor annoyance:  before this disastrous update at the root of all this, whenever I would display the queue, the list would come up with the currently playing track on the screen - maybe the second one down.  Now displaying the queue just shows the list starting with track one, and I have to scroll down to find the currently playing track and see what’s coming.  Low priority obviously, but a change for which there was probably no requirement.

Really not that low priority… it’s a basic UI requirement of a music player, show the playing track and what’s coming next. 

The new app update thread is just a copy and paste of the patchy release notes and easily missed. (No firmware release notes so not exactly complete or comprehensive.) The quality stuff is meaningless corporate speak that is yet to be backed up by anything of substance, and the Trello board is an insult. If that Trello board is accurate then the music library issue doesn’t exist and Sonos think they’ve done queue management on iOS which is a joke frankly. We don’t need threads trying to spin the glacial return of features we already had as progress. 

FIVE months and we are still a long way off where we were. @controlav has provided a much more accurate list of outstanding issues. If Sonos really cared, they’d engage with their own user base on their own board and would take on that list and promise to fix it without any caveats instead of trying to control the ‘narrative’ and pretend they’ve fixed stuff they clearly haven't. And that’s without discussing the hopeless mess that is the new app on a tablet in landscape mode. Lazy doesn’t even come into it. 

I’m not going to have a go at you @Corry P as you clearly try your best to help around here, but the corporate BS needs to stop if Sonos want users to start believing what they say. The lack of direct engagement here, on their own board says much, much more and it’s not good. 

Goodwill and patience, especially on this issue are gone. FIVE MONTHS is beyond unreasonable.