fragmented compilation albums

BTW,  Anyone thinking of tagging all their compilation albums should be made aware of the impact this has on Artist Search capabilities i.e the individual artist will disappear from the Artist list and will appear as ‘Various Artist’ or however you choose to tag your compilation album.   (the Artist may still appear in the list if you have a separate solo Album in their name but the contents will NOT show the compilation album track by that Artist)  

If you then use try to locate the individual Artist & Track using SEARCH then be aware of the limitations: 

IPAD Version 

    Compilation Artist appears in Artist List = NO

    Compilation Artist appears in Search = YES 

Android Version 

    Compilation Artist appears in Artist List = NO

    Compilation Artist appears in Search = YES 

Windows PC Version 

    Compilation Artist appears in Artist List = NO

    Compilation Artist appears in Search = NO 

Hi ​@Stockbeer et al

Welcome to the Sonos Community!

Sorry to hear of the issue you’ve been having with the metadata on your Music Library. 

I recently came across the following text which explains the whys of the recent changes made:

So, while there have been changes made to how Sonos indexes and catalogues the tracks in your Library, hopefully you will see that the way we do it now is an improvement, even if it takes a bit of tag editing for some users to see things they way they should be seen.

Incidentally, Contributing Artists on a compilation album can now be found listed under the Composers sub-section of Music Library.

I hope this helps.

Corry, 

Can I suggest posting your statement above statement in the “Tips for common Sonos problems Self Help” section?

Also I would love to hear why the designers chose to make 100% of customers resort to tagging their compilation albums (with all its pitfalls noted above) rather than the very simple suggestion of having those who encounter duplicate albums resort to just tagging one of those? 

 E.G in your example someone could just adjust the tag on one of the duplicates as “Unplugged EC” or “Unplugged Clapton”.

I have over 7000 tracks and not a single duplicated album so I cant believe the issue is that widespread so why make 100% of customers spend hours retagging ALL compilation albums and not just the handful of those affected?

Hi ​@Editor 

Well, it’s not really a tip - just an explanation of the thought process behind what we did.

The explanation is in the blue box in my earlier post.

So people would have to incorrectly tag their albums? I would not do that, so I would not ask anyone else to either.

I do understand your concerns, but why would it take anyone hours to adjust the tags on their Music Library?

It can be done in seconds. Literally. Whichever tool you are using, you should be able to highlight all your compilation albums and set all their Album Artist tags to “Various Artists” in one fell swoop. If you can’t do that, you are using the wrong tool.

Personally - and neither Sonos nor I can take any responsibility for anything going awry when using third-party software - I use Media Monkey. It is free and can do what I said above. Why I tend to use it is because it can also embed album art into each music file.

100% of our customers? The vast majority of our customers only use streaming services - they don’t keep Music Libraries. I think it may be considerably over 90%. I am sure you meant 100% of our customers who have Music Libraries. Still, however, it should be a simple matter to tag your compilation albums with Various Artists, and not the hours of work that you allude to.

I hope this helps.

There’s something I’m missing from this explanation. I understand that everyone’s main issue with this seems to be around compilation albums specifically, and not the more general “Artist” tagging issues, but…

There’s an ongoing issue with the artist tag that breaks on the mobile app only, where albums don’t show tracks with guest artists.

My understanding is that:

1. ID3 tagging recommends tagging tracks as “Artist” as “main artist; guest artist” and “Album Artist” as the album artist, allowing an album to be fetched and arranged using the “Album Artist”, Various Artist/Compilation tags are another thing.
2. Every single music player except Sonos mobile respects this, but Sonos mobile gets confused and omits these tracks (so that guest-filled last Ozzy album is reduced to a 3-song EP). Sonos desktop and 3rd-party controllers (and by extension the Sonos firmware, unless Sonos were dumb enough to put all their query logic in the client) can read and identify all the tracks on an album.
3. Many music services (eg. Qobuz) play safe and don’t include guest artists, keeping the artist tagging simple, so this is only an issue for those of us that buy/own music and have to live with the fact that we simply “don’t count”.
4. Sonos introduced a load of tagging bugs last summer that they don’t seem interested in fixing.

Maybe the current “different Sonos music players are inconsistent” approach will be replaced by “we killed that pesky useful working superior desktop app so you have to use Sonos mobile” and then we really will have to “re-tag libraries specifically for Sonos”, but assuming that this set of tagging bugs won’t be fixed (or were actually bugs with the whole Sonos platform up until last summer), an actual “Sonos tagging guide” that isn’t buried in a forum post somewhere would be helpful.

I suggest Sonos’ new marketing slogan: “Sonos - you bought the system…SO Now you work for US!  Sonos!”
 

A simple solution:  Sonos should program the software to offer a choice of “Group by Album Name”, along with other choices like iTunes Compilation, et al. or even “Group by Album Artist Name”.  It can’t be hard to program the capability to easily group by one metatag instead of another, and giving users the choice.  The Sonos solution of retagging all the data erases the original artist data.  I don’t know understand why Sonos keeps claiming it does not.  Users in the comments above confirm that, well, changing the metatag means the data is changed. (Sonos is basically organizing its software on the premise that the artists don’t matter and music is a total commodity -  a very weird position for a company marketing to music lovers.) 

Most of all, it’s impossible to understand why, after the software crash, Sonos would want to still cause the users to have to do all this retagging and erasure - with third party software, yet! - and spend even more time and effort to get the Sonos system to work in a user-friendly way.   

Do new customers really understood that Sonos' claim that it can play one’s music library is effectively untrue?   Would they still buy if they knew it?  Is Sonos really hoping for good word-of-mouth referrals from irritated customers? 

Why is Sonos rigidly stuck on some purist engineer’s idea that users must reorganize their extensive libraries to confirm to Sonos choices - instead of satisfying customers with a user-friendly solution?  

The user’s time matters.  It really does.  The idea that it will only take minutes, not hours, for an average user like me  - not a software engineer like the Sonos rep answering the questions - to get the library to work, is first to find this third party software and figure out if it’s on a reliable site or if it’s malware, THEN learn how it works, and THEN immediately, without spending a lot of time testing it, and with high confidence, set it on automatic to alter ALL my library data, is so bizarre, maybe it should be Sonos new marketing slogan.  “Sonos - you bought the system, so now you work for US!”

Really, I just don’t get it.  Is this all some ironic anti-marketing campaign?  

The solution actually seems pretty simple and uncomplicated.  Sonos could simply have the choice of organizing by album, actually use the Album Title tag as the organizing tag, instead of artist data.  Then the album would be listed as a single consolidated item, and any confusion over “compilations” and differing artists would also be resolved, since it would all be subordinate to the album title.  If the concern is about the occasional duplicate album, the user could either delete them, or change the tile to “xxx (Duplicate)” to keep it without harming any of the artist metadata; this would also have benefit of retaining the duplicate as a clear separate item, still included on the album list, and chooseable to play separately from the original.  
 

it’s also hard to see why this change couldn't be reprogrammed easily and quickly.  It’s just substituting one tag for another as the priority organizing data.  

Having read this thread and thinking behind the change, I’m still unable to wrap my head around the logic.

The system worked fine before the firmware update. My music library works perfectly in Windows Media Player, this scenario of clashing album names is just bizarre and I would suggest remote for most users. It’s almost certain everyone with a music library will have at least one compilation album. Why is it only Sonos seemed to found this as an issue and no other software/system provider see it?

As per others requesting, give us a new option to group our albums by album title. Then for anyone with the clashing album names they are still happy, meanwhile the vast majority of us with music library can get it working normally again.

Hi ​@Monkster 

Welcome to the Sonos Community!

Well, while you may not have personally noticed it, it did not work fine before the update - any albums with the same title were amalgamated under one album. For example, if you had more than one Unplugged album (there are a few, after all), they would have appeared as one single album, which is less than ideal. The change in how we index albums has improved this.

I hope this helps.

?  Sorry, I don’t understand.  Are you saying there is a more recent update that does resolve the compilation album problem?  So that compilation albums can be played?  Right now, if I try to play a compilation album, in the Sonos app, I still just get three dots underneath the title, and a notice that it is a compilation and can’t be played.  So the title is working correctly a lot of the time and does group the tracks together —but your player STILL WON’T ALLOW THE TRACKS TO PLAY apparently due to some problem, unique to Sonos since the big update, with allowing the differing album artist and artist meta tags.  (The recommended Sonos solution of editing the artist metatags so they all read the same is ridiculous for a music company to recommend, that we basically erase the artist data!!!). Sonos seems to be focused instead on the smaller but also annoying problem about how a single album can be listed as all separate tracks - also unsolved by you.  HOW HARD CAN IT BE TO LOOK AT HOW YOUR PROGRAM WORKED CORRECTLY BEFORE THE PROBLEM UPDATE, AND THEN ADJUST THE NEW CODE TO WORK THE SAME WAY,  You do have a model for how it should work.  Or you should remove the claim about playing music libraries off your advertising, because it is basically false.