Exporting Sonos playlists

So I ended up writing an app to do this, based on this thread: to export Sonos playlists, Favorites, Radio stations, and Alarms. It exports as human-readable (so you can manually do whatever you want with it) and machine-readable (for more advanced usage). Go to the iOS App Store and search for “sonos export playlist” and you’ll find it. Its free.

So I went to the iOS App Store and it wasn’t there! And I thought that my problem was gone.

Of course my real problem is the inability of the Sonos system to cope with a change to the music source without wrecking playlists. Off topic, so I’ll go somewhere else. So that’s two player/speaker systems that have lost the plot. The other one was Squeezebox. I wonder what’s to come?

Can’t explain why searching can’t find it (maybe it varies by country?), but try the name: “phonos plus”.

@controlav nice app! I was able to then go to tunemymusic.com and transfer my playlist.

Instructions below for an alternative way before finding this post that I had come up with to extract the playlist from Sonos to move to another service:

    1. Ensure you have a Raspberry PI running with the Sonos API installed https://github.com/jishi/node-sonos-http-api
    2. Create a new Excel workbook on the same network that both your Raspberry Pi and Sonos are connected to
    3. In Excel, go to the 'Data' click on the 'From Web' option and put in the Sonos API query string http://RaspberryPi_IP:5005/Room Name/queue
    4. Once the Excel Power Query Editor opens,  right click on the 'List' column header and select 'To Table' and Click 'Ok' (No options should be selected)
    5. In the Converted to Table step, click on the left/right arrows icon in the 'Column1' header and  leave all columns checked, however uncheck the 'Use original column name as prefix' option and Click 'OK'
    6. In the Excel 'Home' Ribbon, click 'Close & Load'
    7. Save your new workbook for future use (you can use this to refresh with your current Sonos que at anytime)
    8. To convert your current Sonos que to another platform play list, in Excel go to 'File' and export to a CSV (Comma delimited) file and save the name of the file as the description of your playlist
    9. Go to http://www.tunemymusic.com and get choose 'Let's Start' and choose the 'Upload file' from the bottom of the page.
    10. From there, everything should be self explanatory

I use VLC to create playlists and save it in the .m3u file format. I store these playlists in a folder in Sonos app’s music library on my hard drive.  m3u is a simple format and can be edited with a text editor or just open it up in VLC to add/remove songs.  As for sharing the playlist, you can email the .m3u file to your friends etc.  to Sonos for still not implementing, after all these years and so many requests, what seems like a really easy, basic feature like exporting a playlist.  Did you know that if you ever  have to do a reset, you will permanently lose your Sonos playlists because in addition to not providing an export function, Sonos does not provide a way to back up one’s playlists. cheeeeehoooooo

Good question! TLDR; Sonos would be interested in doing that because they want customers to mention their product when asked for a recommendation.

If you’re satisfied with that answer feel free to stop here otherwise, read on for the real-world example that led me to this thread and learn

How a seemingly insignificant feature impacts the long-term viability of a business

TLDR; I lost my data. They lost my trust. Now I can’t recommend Sonos. 

Here’s how - switching from Google Play Music to Spotify

1. First, I went to Google Takeout and exported my playlists.
2. I also have playlists created on my Sonos but unfortunately they aren’t synced to Google and can’t be exported or shared.
3. Next, I signed up for Spotify and added it to Sonos.
4. Then, I removed my Google Play account from Sonos.
5. Now, My Sonos playlists are empty.

The lesson I learned was don’t create Sonos playlists and don’t trust the Sonos app.

Why would Sonos care if they make money selling hardware?

How can me not using their free software have any measurable impact on their business? 

For the sake of simplicity, I will answer like this:

• What Sonos wants is paying customers, because that’s how they make money.
• What Sonos needs is advocates, because that’s how they grow their business.

In short, even though a customer (me) spent thousands of dollars on Sonos products in the past 4 years I can no longer enthusiastically recommend their product.

How does my lack of enthusiasm affect their business?

When someone asks if I recommend Sonos over Apple or Google or Alexa I won’t have an easy answer, because it depends - the hardware is reliable but if you’re the kind of person who loves to create playlists I have a warning - there is no way to export them and personally, I lost every playlist I ever created, every song I ever loved, every queue I ever saved, all of it. 

In summary: Sonos should be interested to add support for playlist exporting because they can’t grow their business if loyal customers won’t recommend their product.

Happy to answer any follow-up questions.

So for those of us who have a Sonos Move, you cannot play your Sonos playlists via the app when the device is connected via Bluetooth. So, it would be useful if you could export/print your playlist to duplicate the playlists in Amazon music/Apple Music/Spotify etc…..

Perfectly reasonable request as this IS a software limitation whichever way you look at it.

You can now export your Sonos playlists easily to SoundIIZ, and then convert them to any music service: https://support.soundiiz.com/hc/en-us/articles/360018717099-Export-Sonos-playlists-and-transfer-them-with-Soundiiz

If the playlist is constricted from many sources, this doesn't work. If it consists entirely of tracks from one service, it should have been constructed in that service in tbe first place, not as a Sonos playlist. 

How does having media monkey result in my playlists being exported? All it had is a link to the app not instructions. Have you tried before you recommended?

(And yes as mentioned above the issue is your Sonos playlists are rendered useless when you change music provider as I have from Rhapsody to lastfm to  iTunes to Google Play music to Youtubemusic to Spotify.... (Early adopter)