Hi Ken, a lot of my library is held in apple music. For those with many compilation albums it’s possible in apple music to make a smart playlist with the rule “compilation” “is true” to get them to show in one view without having to work your way through the compilations folder.

But Apple hasn’t, to my knowledge, incorporated ‘smart lists’ into Sonos, although I haven’t tried in a while. Are you able to get them to work in Sonos?

No, this is just to help find all compilation albums in apple music on a desktop machine in order to edit the metadata.

Ken Grifiths’ suggestion didn’t work. Crooners and Swooners still shows as individual tracks, not an album. Thanks, though. It’s fine in BlueSound.

Did you change the ‘Group Albums’ to use ‘Album Artist’ as shown in the earlier screenshot from the S2 Desktop App and did you also re-index your library?

Yes. It was set that way, then I changed it to the ITunes compilation setting and then back again to Album Artist. I just did the one album as a test. It all boils down to the a failure by a company that seems determined to fail. I suppose we are supposed to take solace in their October promise to set objectives and test changes. Is this a satire?

It’s not satire - compilations group/work fine for the local library here, as shown earlier in this thread.

If not done already, you are perhaps best to speak to Sonos Support. Maybe they can discover why things are not working for your shared library.

Yeah, good idea ​@BLD2 - that will work too to select/highlight ALL compilations to then change their ‘Album Artist’ tag, if needed, to ‘Various Artist’ - thanks for that suggestion.

Hi Everyone

I’ve been given some information which sheds new light on why we made the change that we did: the old way of sorting compilation albums occasionally resulted in unrelated albums showing as the same album, and this is obviously less than ideal. For example, think of two Unplugged or Greatest Hits albums - when by two different artists (or set of artists), they are clearly unrelated, but with the old sort method would sometimes show as the same album. Using the new compilation sorting method, these similarly-titled albums will no longer show as being the same album.

I hope this helps, and clarifies things a little.

It worked before. It doesn’t now. Nice fix.

Can you let the team know that they have moved from an “occasional problem” for a few to a “permanent problem” for a large group of users.

I and many others have suffered & continue to suffer the fragmented compilation album issue and yet I never once encountered the problem you describe above.  To my mind they chose a fix for a rare problem and created a worse and more obvious problem for a large group of users.   

Not the right choice in my opinion.

Perhaps they could roll back the update whilst they think of a better solution ? 

Hi @Editor

Well, the issue is that before, there was no way to resolve the issue of albums being mistaken for or combined with other albums. There is a way for you to resolve what is happening now - to add Album Artists tags to your media. The tag is there, and in my mind, that is because it is felt that it should be used if needed. It is needed for compilation albums.

To put it another way, I think it very unlikely that it will be changed again.

I have changed the tags and sometimes it fixes the problem. Other times it doesn’t. I am not a Sonos hobbyist. It is a faulty tool, the operation of which has been altered to make it nearly useless to me. This either needs to be fixed or Sonos needs to send refunds.

Which software tool did you use to change the relevant tags?

Hi ​@HJ Bernstein 

I am sorry to hear that you are still having a problem, but such a description is not sufficient in detail enough for us to bring to the attention of the developers. All I can suggest is that you call in and demonstrate your issue so that it can be understood and documented.

Refunds are available to those products within the Money Back Guarantee period, and only to those users who bought direct from Sonos.com. You can start the process at www.sonos.com/mbg.

I hope this helps.

I changed them manually. As I said, I am not a Sonos hobbyist and while I am coming to understand that my ITunes library can be changed, I haven’t found explanations/instructions that I would be confident following without fear of making things worse. There were also warnings from Cory earlier about waiting rather than making alternations that might not be compatible with whatever solution they came up. I do appreciate the folks on this thread. Hours on hold waiting in the Sonos queue are an experience I do not like repeating.  I don’t know if they do callbacks again, but for a while they didn’t. 

The more I hear from Sonos, the angrier I get. I will call in when time allows.

Sorry, but omg… what do you think!? 
Sonos music library isn’t a magic trashcan to put in all your untagged music files from all over the net. 
You need well tagged files to get it work like a charm. 
If it worked somehow in the past without tagging such accurately, it might have been a lucky situation. 
But just shouting out loudly „it has to work“ without knowing or ignoring the needs for that imo is like a little kid stamping feet on the ground. 
Good luck finding that magic tool… 

Just my 2 cents…

None of it came from the net. It was all loaded into Itunes from CD’s. In the few cases where there was a problem, it was easily solved by changing the tags to match. I didn’t intend to buy a audio engineering project. It worked as planned. Now it doesn’t. We were told not retag, now we are told retagging is the only thing that will restore the compilation function. Bluesound works.

You might want to consider the freeware app Mp3tag. Works like a charm.

If that really is your point of view I can only advice you to switch to Bluesound. If you choose not to, you'd be better off by changing the tags of your music files. It'll make your problems disappear.

I now have both. I use Bluesound with my receiver and living room and outdoor speakers and Sonos on two soundbars attached to TV’s. The Sonos port is still there for use with the receiver but gets little play now. As I said in an earlier post, I will reach out to Sonos for assistance. 

Clever thinking.

Who told you not to tag?  If you want every music control point software ever conceived by humans to read your music library correctly you really need an Album Artist tag ( Exception:  Sonos a while back could not even read the Album Artist tag.  Was later fixed ). 
 

If you want an “audio engineering project” take up classical music.  Those tags are a mess!
 

You might want to ask Apple why their tagging does not include an Album Artist tag by default.  I think there is a setting in Apple somewhere to utilize Album Artist, but I don’t ever use iTunes so I don’t know.

Yes Sonos used to read those Apple tags correctly.  Maybe someday they will again.

Fairly early into the compilations problem someone suggested a tagging solution. Corry discouraged it as he had no idea what the fix would be and seemed concerned that if the tags were changed and the Sonos changed back to the way it was, there would be a new problem. Can’t blame him for caution in uncertain times. My library is about 8500 tracks, more thant half classical. I downloaded the MP3tag software and am researching how to use it.