Duplicate album names queued together

Two chat sessions and a two-hour phone call later:  the issue is apparently being escalated with ‘level two support’.  I have received an email from a rep there asking for additional info, which I just provided.  I knew this was going to be painful, but at least I did not have to wait on hold as long as I feared.

FYI:

This afternoon, per request from level 2, I played a track from one of the duplicate Alicia Keys album entries and then submitted a diagnostic.

Then I played the same track as selected from the other duplicate album entry and submitted another diagnostic.

I sent both confirmation numbers back to them.

I did this using the Android controller on my phone.

Updates to follow as I get more info.

Phone call/screen sharing session today with L2 just basically confirmed everything already known about the situation.  A call with L3 is now scheduled for Wednesday 5/28/2025.

Just eyeballing, I see eight album titles that are used on albums by different artists but are not problematic.  Listing them here just for my own reference:  closer, distant shores, double take, eye in the sky, greatest hits, live, one step closer, smile.

Known duplicate album titles that are shown twice in the Sonos album list:  Crash (album artist = Mark Isham) and Unplugged (album artist = Alicia Keys).

And while reviewing everything today, I found one more ‘album’ that is problematic:  Paste Vault (album artist = Various Artists) occurs THREE times. This is not really an ‘album’; it’s a collection of 157 tracks that Paste magazine made available for free a long time ago.  I downloaded them, placed them all in a subfolder of my ‘music’ folder, and tagged them with the above album name and album artist. ‘Joe Pug’ is simply the contributing artist on track 70.  No idea why it was treated separately.

Regardless, if I select any of the three ‘Paste Vault’ album titles, I see all 157 tracks.  If I ‘replace queue’ with any of the album titles, all 157 tracks are queued.

The really weird thing is that, even though the Joe Pug track is number 70, it is always listed (and queued) first, no matter which album title is selected. Then all 156 other tracks are listed (and queued) in track number sequence.

Weird indeed...

Phone call and screen sharing session took place on Wednesday 5/28/2025 as planned.  L3 rep looked at the metadata for the suspect albums and saw nothing problematic.  He did have me try changing a couple of things related to a ‘contributing artist’ setting and another ‘compilation’ field in the metadata; the latter had no effect, but the ‘contributing artist’ change did affect how tracks were listed with each duplicate album entry, but did not resolve the fact that the albums show up multiple times in the album list.  He did ask me to display ‘Properties’ for each *album*, just to see if ‘Multiple Values’ might be shown for Album Title or Album Artist, in case there were some garbage unprintable characters in some of them, but everything seemed clean.

He seemed particularly interested in the Paste Vault situation, since every track in that ‘album’ has basically the same metadata:  Album Title = Paste Vault, Album Artist = Various Artists, and Contributing Artist = the actual track artist. Special attention was given to the display of Joe Pug as the ‘album artist’ on one entry, so he had me upload some tracks from that album:  track 70 (the one with Joe Pug as the contributing artist), one numbered before track 70, and one numbered after it.

At one point while checking things out he asked me to queue the Crash soundtrack album. Since we were working in Windows, I used the Windows controller to make the queue request, and of course if queued both Crash albums, so he also saw first-hand the nature of that problem.

He said to look for a follow-up email from him, so I was waiting before posting an update, but I haven’t heard anything yet.  Figured I better post something to keep this alive; will post any more info as I receive it.  I did tell him that the duplicate entries were really not causing me any heartburn, but that kind of garbage, coupled with the other problems encountered with their controller, makes one question the overall reliability of their software...and other products?