Exporting Sonos playlists

I can give Sonos one excellent reason to give their users to export their Sonos Playlists. (The main reason why I want it.) Because Sonos speakers are very problematic when it comes to updates. Causing you to have to rebuild your Playlists all over again. For this reason, it would be an excellent move by Sonos to allow you to export your Playlists to save on your computer to easily re-import the Playlist again when Sonos’ latest update caused you to have to re-install the app all over again and thus causing you to have to rebuild all your Playlists that were lost because Sonos feels it is best to not allow you to export your Sonos Playlist. Now, doesn't that sound like a good reason?

Odd. I’ve never experienced an issue with, or needed to rebuild a Sonos playlist in the ten plus years  I’ve been using the system, across standard software updates, the change from S1 to S2, and several moves between various homes. Which isn’t to say you haven’t, just another datapoint. It does make me wonder if there’s something else at the root of the issue.

The only application I could see where this might be useful is transferring my playlist to someone else’s system, but then that would also imply them having access to either my local files on my HD or NAS, or the same streaming companies that I have, since the play list is merely a set of pointers to various locations to get/access music. And if it consists of music from one streaming company, it would be easier to build a play list with them directly, rather than doing it as a Sonos play list. 

That is nonsense.  I have never had a problem in ten years of using Sonos.   You need to sort out your shaky network

Just wrong… reinstalling the app has zero effect on Sonos playlists.  They are stored on the speakers.  You could uninstall all your apps and reinstall them afresh right now and your playlists would be unaffected.

I am not clear what people are looking for from an exported playlist.  Is it just a text listing that you can manually recreate elsewhere?  If so then that doesn’t seem a huge value-add.

Or is it an electronic set of music service URLs and local filepaths (potentially many different services and storage locations).  If so, which system(s) are you planning to use this with?  What format does it need to be in for the system to be able to use it?

Perhaps someone will enlighten me?

Playlists are confusing on Sonos (so many different things are called playlists), and folks often create large Sonos playlists before they realize they should have created a music service playlist instead (eg so they can play them in the car). While moving playlists between music services is possible via a couple of web sites, the Sonos playlists are locked to their Sonos household, which is why I created my app: to break them free.

Tanks for your reply @controlav .  I suspect that many who request the export of playlists don’t have a clear idea of what they are asking for and how they would use it.  As you say, Sonos playlists are a bit of an odd beast. 

To all who have responded, odd and nonsense and to never had that issue in the 10 years you have been using Sonos.

I had to rebuild my Playlists at least 6 times in the last 6 months. Oh, and I “was” in direct contact with a Sonos Supervisor Tech Support representative. Who even had me try and do test Playlists. So, lucky for you that you had never had to rebuild a Playlist in your 10 years.

Though, I will say, maybe I would of never had to rebuild a Playlist once if Sonos would provide the ability to download and save a Playlist as a backup or allow a user to lock which particular Sonos speaker the app pulls the Playlists from. (I say this because my system containing two older Play:1 speakers and one newer Sonos One speaker. The Playlists works fine on the Sonos One speaker when it is the associated speaker. But when the app wants to use either of the older Sonos speakers as the associated speaker, then Playlist issues are present.) Note: I have the Sonos One speaker the closest proximity to the router and have tried a few times in disconnecting and reconnecting speakers to force the app to use the Sonos One as the associated speaker. But nothing seems to help.

Again, why is is such a travesty to allow a user to save or export a Playlist? Unless Sonos is fearful or doing something wrong in the first place.

The only way you lose playlists is if you factory reset every Sonos unit in your system, something which is never needed and is not recommended.  Any fix which results from a factory reset can be accomplished by a simple reboot.  On top of that a factory reset erases important diagnostic data which can help Sonos support in solving any problems not corrected by a reboot.

Bottom line - Stop with the factory resets.

https://en.community.sonos.com/troubleshooting-228999/factory-reset-what-you-need-to-know-6832540

I don’t want to burst your bubble. But my Sonos system for those four months was not finding my music and the “Sonos Supervisor Support Tech kept telling me to factory reset” to try and resolve the issue. It was NOT on my initiative to factory reset the Sonos speakers. If was on the directive of the Sonos Supervisor Support Tech

But as this whole discussion began, whether or not a Playlist is lost or not be a factory reset or yes, there is always a technology issue at occasional times which calls for a router, computer system or product reset in which a complete reset or re-install is required. It’s a good thing to have a backup of your settings (in this case, a Playlist backed up somewhere to easily import back into your product.

But Sonos chooses not to do this. Why? Why don’t any of you answer the real question here, as to why Sonos refuses to export a Playlist for a backup of the Playlist. Rather than attack their customers as being dumb and not really having an issue of maintaining a Playlist in their speakers.

Sonos support very often gives bad advice, and depending on where the support originates, they are far behind the advice you get here on this forum.  Factory resetting is useless, and often does bad things like . . .  Oh . . . deleting all your playlists!  So stop factory resetting, no matter who tells you to, and especially stop doing it to every Sonos unit you own.  Playlists saved, no need for backups.