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Contributor I
February 25, 2013

Feature Request: Export and Import Sonos Playlists

  • February 25, 2013
  • 216 replies
  • 29979 views
Like many users, we use Sonos in two different houses. We have two NAS's of music that I'm planning on keeping synchronized with RSYNC. What doesn't sync or cant get exported are Sonos Playlists. It would be great to be able to ad-hoc export them and then to import them as well. Using the UPnP interface, I've noted a Java program that can export playlists, but importing them is a bit troublesome. It would be great to have this feature.
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216 replies

controlav
Lead Maestro
June 18, 2019
Importing directly into Napster is hard, and requires the encryption to be broken on the music service credentials, plus then some non-trivial SMAPI code to create the playlists, so I don't think that is feasible unless you already have the decryption figured out.

To create a fresh Sonos playlist from a hand-fixed version of one you downloaded, you can use the UPnP tool of choice to:

Load the edited xml into the queue, and I am unsure of this as I have no code examples to look at. My best guess is first AVTransport.RemoveAllTracksFromQueue() to empty it (this I know works), then ContentDirectory.CreateObject("Q:0", xml-string)
but I am less sure about that second call. An UpdateObject might make more sense here.

Once the queue is loaded with the right stuff, call AVTransport.SaveQueue(0, playlistname, "") (playlistname must not already exist) to turn that into a playlist.
Author of the leading independent Sonos apps for Android, MacOS, iOS, Windows and Xbox.
Lyricist II
June 18, 2019
Hi controlav,

I got a response back from Sonos support - advising I use the external streaming playlist functionality! So I've dumped my huge export into a spreadsheet - and am cherry picking the lists into Napster via: https://soundiiz.com/webapp/playlists - so far it's working out OK - a little slow, but that's due to it all being copy and paste. I think I'll see how the UX works using Napster playlists for a while - if I get frustrated, I might be back here to revisit the queue import solution. Thanks for your help - wouldn't have managed to get this far without you.
controlav
Lead Maestro
June 19, 2019
waynef, couldn't you convert the xml into a playlist format that soundiiz can handle (with a bit of code eg a simple m3u file), then let soundiiz get that into Napster? (Just a suggestion, I've never used that service but coding to avoid a lot of copy & paste is always preferred 🙂
Author of the leading independent Sonos apps for Android, MacOS, iOS, Windows and Xbox.
Lyricist II
June 19, 2019
The soundiz platform only accepts one playlist at a time - it would have been worth importing a master file with playlist name etc. all defined within that file - but no batch import feature as yet. so either copy and past from a known spreadsheet - or import a load of individual files... I chose the former as it allowed me to see where I was up to 🙂 Works reasonably well - trick is to ensure you get artist and track title for the song to be recognised.
Lyricist II
September 4, 2019
Out of curiosity, why do you think this is an important feature?
If you have more than one home, with a Sonos in each home, this saves all the effort of having to create a playlist in each home.
Contributor I
October 6, 2019
I see a lot of different questions in this thread. I agree with most of them, but I know this is difficult functionality to build for SONOS if it has to be really sophisticated - as desired over here 🙂.

I Just made a new request for a SIMPLE feauture to export playlists: https://en.community.sonos.com/ask-a-question-228987/please-make-a-basic-playlist-export-feature-available-6830816 . PLEASE gfive your support to get at least a simple start function...