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Sherah
Contributor I
January 6, 2025
Answered

Music library album sorting

  • January 6, 2025
  • 6 replies
  • 353 views

I use both Sonos 1 and 2 apps depending upon equipment played.  The Sonos 1 app sorts albums in the music library.  The Sonos 2 app sorts albums based upon artist.  The problem is that any album containing different artists for different tracks causes multiple listing of the same album in the music library - once for each track with different artists.  I have a multi-disc set with over over 100 tracks, each with a different artist.  As a result, there are 100 listings of the album in the music library when viewing the list of albums (In the Sonos 1 app, there is only one listing of this album).  Is there any way to get the Sonos 2 app to sort in the same way as the Sonos 1 app?

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Best answer by Schlumpf

​@Sherah 

S2 works different and you will have to tag your files the following way:

  1. mark each track of the album as a compilation 
  2. tag all tracks of the album with the same album artist  e. g. „various artists“

6 replies

Schlumpf
SchlumpfAnswer
Virtuoso
January 6, 2025

​@Sherah 

S2 works different and you will have to tag your files the following way:

  1. mark each track of the album as a compilation 
  2. tag all tracks of the album with the same album artist  e. g. „various artists“
Ralf
    SherahAuthor
    Contributor I
    January 7, 2025

    Thank you.

      Editor
      Enthusiast II
      January 8, 2025

      If you do tag your compilation albums with “Compilation” ,“Various Artists” or similar as the ALBUM ARTIST Tag then be aware that the individual artists quoted on each track WONT appear in the artist list unless you also have a non compilation album by that same artist.

      Even if you do have that artist on a separate album the track from the compilation album will be missing from under that artist. 

       

      All the tracks will appear under an artist called compilation” or “various Artists” or however you tagged the album. 

       

      I spent 2 days tagging my compilation albums and found this out the hard way. 

       

      The “Search” function will sometimes find an artist from a track tagged as a compilation album but it seems to be device dependent (IOS / Android / PC versions behave differently).   

       

      Thus you solve one problem of multiple albums appearing but create a new problem of the individual artists going missing.  

      Schlumpf
      Schlumpf
      Virtuoso
      January 8, 2025

      ​@Editor 

      Did you also tag the file with an „artist“ or just with „album artist“?

       

      Ralf
      Editor
      Enthusiast II
      January 9, 2025

      Yes the tracks do all have the Artist tag labelled correctly,  that is how I noticed the Artists disappear from the Artist list as I completed the Album Artist Tagging 

      Laurie White
      Contributor I
      March 28, 2025

      I spent an hour with a SONOS representative who took control of my Windows PC app.
      Case No. 07561420     What I describe below is also true of the Apple IOS apps.

      I demonstrated that a search of compilation ALBUMS by ALBUM TITLE  produced multiple album entries in the list, each album having one track.

      The mp3 tags on all the tracks were set up with:

      Album Artist = “Various Artists” (i.e. a compilation)  and Track Artist = actual artist on each track.

      This changes the metadata for the mp3 files..

      The Sonos representative found the observations “interesting” but basically observed that "this is how it works and "I need to change the metadata for the tracks”.  In other words, Sonos don’t want to pursue this any further.

      I believe that a search by album should show ONE album for each ALBUM TITLE regardless of whether it’s a compilation album.

      This would require Sonos to GROUP the tracks by ALBUM ARTIST (set by the user as “Various Artists”)  which after selection would display Track Title and Track Artist. These fields are all available in the mp3 tags which can be edited by various apps to alter the metadata.

      Sonos could easily fix this.

      Maybe this unwillingness to really get down and explore the user experience and address such shortcomings is why the SONOS app has been in a mess for such a long time.

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