fragmented compilation albums

The WAV format is known to be problematic in its handling of tags. I read that FLAC has more of a standard approach to tags and was trying that approach.  

Sonos should make this easy for the customer. If one chooses iTunes compilation, then the album listing should look like iTunes, unfragmented, with all the artist data intact.  Period.  The albums should simply be grouped by album name, not by album artist or track artist. That would solve the fragmentation problem,  The Sonos app used to work that way, so it can’t be too hard to adjust it to work that way again.  it is very anti-customer and very arrogant of Sonos to expect the users to expand hours and hours on their music libraries, changing the original album data, to get it to work.  And by the way, changing all album artists to various artists does not defragment the album. The only way to defragment the album is to also change the track artist to various artists, destroying the most important data of the album.  if Sonos wants to change its image after its software disaster, maybe you should do it by repairing the software.   Disappointing, disappointing, disappointing, Sonos still doesn’t get it.  

I hope someone at Sonos is actually listening. Change your software so that the albums are grouped by album name, and that tracks with the same album name are shown as a single album, without fragmentation. Since the whole marketing focus of Sonos was customer ease and plug and play, Sonos should actually make the software work.   You know, by definition, requiring customers to spend hours manipulating individual data items to get the software to work is not customer, friendly or plug and play.   It’s just bad.  

It shouldn’t take you (personally) ‘hours’, just a few minutes to put wheels in motion to change the one tag field of each ‘compilation’ track - I just set MP3Tag to change all the compilation album artists field to ‘Various Artists’ and walked away - the software did the rest and it was soon resolved.

I just had to reindex the local library (after completion) to resolve the display issue in the App, but again that scan can be started and the indexing will continue without any further user involvement.

The cost to the end-user in terms of time this takes is quite small, comparatively speaking. You don’t have to sit there and wait until the tags are updated, or the library has been re-indexed.

So customers need to obtain and learn to use a third-party piece of software, for Sonos to properly show our libraries?  And then have this software erase and substitute all the original data in an artist field, irreversibly?  Rather than all that imposition in the users - and since the third party software shows it can be done - why doesn’t Sonos simply adapt its own software, to ignore the album artist field, and correctly show the albums, unfragmented?  If the album artist field has to all be changed to an identical “Various Artists” tag, that means essentially that the field is being removed from Sonos’ consideration when determining how to list the album.  So —- just tell Sonos software to ignore the field, rather than have users do Sonos’ work for it.

Goodness me you are making a mountain out of a mole hill - some software or another is adding the tags to the tracks in the first place and besides MP3Tag is ‘free’ anyway and no it’s not irreversible you could quite easily copy the ‘artist’ field to ‘album artist’ later or even duplicate your ‘album artist’ under a different tag identity to restore later. My point though was these things take minutes for a user to do and not hours, even though the process might be lengthy, the user interaction is quite minimal to resolve this somewhat simple tag issue in a users local library compilations folder.

I am with LPG on this point. 

If we roll back a year this was not an issue and you certainly didn’t have to use MP3Tag or similar to play around with tags in order for your compilation alums to display correctly. 

I did see in another post that Sonos were trying to cure a problem with albums with exactly the same name being confused. I don’t know if that was the real reason as I haven’t seen a post from anyone at Sonos clearly laying out the problem they were trying to resolve.

However, it would seem that they have created many more issues for customers by taking the path they have chosen.  I kind of think it would have been easier to explain to a much smaller audience of people that if they hit an issue with albums with duplicate names then that would be the time to step in and change tags to differentiate them. 

It seems that they chose a path that makes every single customer who uses a media library have to take action to correct a problem that didn’t exist prior to May 2024 and that is what is so frustrating and disappointing.

I am also disappointed to note that this was not (and is still not) clearly explained to all customers as to the impact of this change they made and what action customers need to take to resolve the issue. You can see that by the number of times this topic comes up in the forum that many customers are still confused / unaware. 

Can you imagine how many customers would be out off purchasing Sonos if the shop they went to explained that “oh by the way, if you have a media library that contains albums by various artists you have to download a 3rd party application to update the Album Artist Tag on all of them”? 

I’d like to ask what the barrier is, that prevents Sonos from fixing this album fragmentation problem?  Sonos software used to list albums properly before the software crash, iTunes can do it, and apparently MP3Tag can do it.  Sonos knows how it did it previously.  And a key selling feature of Sonos is music library access, which is NOT being delivered.  I really don’t understand from a marketing perspective why Sonos would allow such a major defect to continue — especially since Sonos probably has a major marketing opportunity now with the reported Samsung soundbar software crash.  

I’m not saying Sonos will not resolve this issue eventually, as there were several options to ‘group folders’ in their older S2 App, but was just saying to fix this now yourself is not a mammoth task to group by ‘album artist’ and switch compilations ‘album artist’ tag to read as “various artists” - it resolves the issue immediately. The fix has been awaited for some time and it appears it has not been at the top of the priority list - no doubt it will get resolved at some point, but as stated it’s a fix, or workaround, that takes minutes (not hours) from a user-interaction perspective) and can sort things, at least until Sonos developers get around to resolving the issue. 

Personally speaking, IMV, there are a number of other more important priorities that likely sit above this compilation display issue, which can be resolved by the end-user anyway, by a simple change of the tag field.