Feature Request: Export and Import Sonos Playlists

Medimonkey findet Sonos Playlisten unter Medienserver/Saved Queues. Diese kann ich markieren und mit Strg+E in eine Wiedergabeliste exportieren.

Diese exportierte Liste habe ich dann in Excel geöffnet, absteigend von a-Z sortiert und dann unter Daten die Duplikate entfernt.

Wie bekomme ich sie jetzt wieder in Sonos zurück?

l.G.

Frank

Have to say that Sonos is constantly updating the software, and offering people the opportunity to help improve it, and while I'm 100% behind the basic ability to export playlists, I'm very happy with the kit overall. I've taken to saving playlists to Spotify - not ideal, and I have to pay to do that. It's time we had an answer on this - there's obviously a reason they've not enabled it, maybe copyright? I really don't know... Come in mods - step in and give us a proper response - we know you're listening 😉

I agree. But that's why it is so odd that there is no official response to this. Most of the time if I have some small thing, customer support is quick and good. And really this doesn't seem like something that hard?

I'm with you Douwe! I assume that enabling the saving/export of playlists has some kind of knock-on affect that end-users are missing - it's all guesswork from our point of view isn't it? I lost all of my playlists last year - gutting.

As selzhanik mentioned, you CAN export sonos playlists. Mediamonkey is free and it can see your sonos playlists just as easily as it can see your music library. Just export them as m3u files to any folder on your computer that you like. You can even set mediamonkey to export them every night as a backup.

As selzhanik mentioned, you CAN export sonos playlists. Mediamonkey is free and it can see your sonos playlists just as easily as it can see your music library. Just export them as m3u files to any folder on your computer that you like. You can even set mediamonkey to export them every night as a backup.
It's a good call and I intend looking into it , but it's not everyone who wants to reorganise the back end of their media set up to safeguard their playlists, when an option built into the Sonos software would be straightforward. 'Save/import your playlists'

Hello Selzhanik,

can we work on it together?

I can find the Sonos-Playlists in MediaMonkey under Medienserver/Saved Queues

This I can export with Strg+E in an m3u file.

In Excel I delete duplicates, save it as a .txt file and then rename it to m3u.

But the list has entries like:

npsdy:Tra.54658904.mp3.

all other lines start with

x-file-cifs://

This list I cannot open with any player. Can you give me a hint?

Regards

Frank

So what you're having trouble with is the "I had to use a text editor from there to do some formatting cleanup".  Depending on your technical expertise, this could be obvious or complicated.

This process is going to differ based on what kind of operating system you have, media player that needs to read the playlist, and so on.  I have a Windows Home Server 2011 most of the music is stored on, a Windows 7 desktop and I'm using many different media players throughout the house (though WinAmp and iTunes most often).  So your mileage may vary.  I used Scintilla Text Editor to edit the m3u file (I use SciTE for all kinds of things on a daily basis).

The first thing I had to do was find all of the XML-unfriendly characters that had been replaced by "%XX" and change them back into the actual characters.  The most common replacement was the space character.  I replaced every "%20" with a single space (" ").  After that was the ampersand -- replaced every "%26" with "&".  Then I simply searched the file for all other "%" characters and made the other edits *.  I used a simple ASCII table (see http://www.ascii-code.com/ as an example) when I didn't know the codes already.

* One thing I would note (and I had only one instance of this): UTF-8 characters.  They show up as consecutive codes, like "%xx%xx".  My example was "\\HOMESERVER\Music\Local\Salvador\Salvador\05 - La Monta%c3%f1a.flac" which I changed to "\\HOMESERVER\Music\Local\Salvador\Salvador\05 - La Montaña.flac".  The actual file name has a single lowercase n with a tilde ("ñ").  I did not need to replace the "ñ" with "ñ" to get my playlist to work.  I suppose if I did, I'd probably need to name the file with an m3u8 extension (I possibly should have anyway).  For more info on these codes, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8.

The second thing I had to do was for every line that started with "x-file-cifs://" (which was EVERY line my particular playlists) I had to convert remove the "x-file-cifs:" and replace each / with \.  Thus, my entry "x-file-cifs://HOMESERVER/Music/Local/Pearl Jam/Backspacer/03 - The Fixer.flac" became "\\HOMESERVER\Music\Local\Pearl Jam\Backspacer\03 - The Fixer.flac".

The third thing I had to do was replace each colon that was left with a semi-colon.  It appears the Sonos replaces ";" with ":" in their behind-the-scenes listings.  I searched for ":" and replaced with ";".  An example is "\\HOMESERVER\Music\Local\Yes\Highlights: The Very Best of Yes\04 - I've Seen All Good People: Your Move-All Good People.flac" going to "\\HOMESERVER\Music\Local\Yes\Highlights; The Very Best of Yes\04 - I've Seen All Good People; Your Move-All Good People.flac"

And after all that, my playlist worked in WinAmp and iTunes.

Chris Glynn - what do you mean by "and offering people the opportunity to help improve it"?  If I had the opportunity to contribute to the Sonos code-base, I'd probably do so...  Did they open-source it somewhere?

This is a good workaround and it helps for some problems. Not for importing the play list again though.