Exporting Sonos playlists

  • 22 January 2020
  • 53 replies
  • 14823 views

Userlevel 3

I am a little shocked that Sonos still hasn’t provided a way to export a playlist yet. I have invested a lot into the speaker system because of the quality however being restricted like this is discerning to say the least. I am not sure what the point is now in creating a Sono playlist ever and I’ll keep to only using Spotify or Apple musics playlist features. Sonos I would highly recommend you invest in this feature moving forward. 


53 replies

Userlevel 2

@Stanley_4 why are you being so obtuse and unhelpful?

Wanting to export a Sonos queue or playlist is a perfectly reasonable request. 

My scenario would be when we have added tracks to a Sonos queue and want to save it to Tidal or Deezer or wherever for playing in the car or elsewhere at a later date. At the moment we are stuck with it existing in Sonos only. 

There are plenty of tools to transfer playlists between music services, so why not Sonos? Duh! 

Userlevel 3

...so I can export my playlist to any other music service. So I can create playlists based on my home computer music files but also listen to the same playlist with other music sources. Does that answer your question? 

Userlevel 3

Gee, Stanley, thanks for confirming I should have invested into a Bose sound system instead of being restricted by Sonos software. 

Userlevel 1
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Why would Sonos be interested in doing that?

Good question! TLDR; Sonos would be interested in doing that because they want customers to mention their product when asked for a recommendation.

If you’re satisfied with that answer feel free to stop here otherwise, read on for the real-world example that led me to this thread and learn

How a seemingly insignificant feature impacts the long-term viability of a business

TLDR; I lost my data. They lost my trust. Now I can’t recommend Sonos. 

Here’s how - switching from Google Play Music to Spotify

  1. First, I went to Google Takeout and exported my playlists.
  2. I also have playlists created on my Sonos but unfortunately they aren’t synced to Google and can’t be exported or shared.
  3. Next, I signed up for Spotify and added it to Sonos.
  4. Then, I removed my Google Play account from Sonos.
  5. Now, My Sonos playlists are empty.
List of empty Sonos Playlists from removed Google Play Music account

 

The lesson I learned was don’t create Sonos playlists and don’t trust the Sonos app.

Why would Sonos care if they make money selling hardware?

How can me not using their free software have any measurable impact on their business? 

For the sake of simplicity, I will answer like this:

  • What Sonos wants is paying customers, because that’s how they make money.
  • What Sonos needs is advocates, because that’s how they grow their business.

In short, even though a customer (me) spent thousands of dollars on Sonos products in the past 4 years I can no longer enthusiastically recommend their product.

How does my lack of enthusiasm affect their business?

When someone asks if I recommend Sonos over Apple or Google or Alexa I won’t have an easy answer, because it depends - the hardware is reliable but if you’re the kind of person who loves to create playlists I have a warning - there is no way to export them and personally, I lost every playlist I ever created, every song I ever loved, every queue I ever saved, all of it. 

In summary: Sonos should be interested to add support for playlist exporting because they can’t grow their business if loyal customers won’t recommend their product.

Happy to answer any follow-up questions.

Userlevel 2

Me, too, I wanted to be on the save side and backup and export my precious Sonos playlists. And me, too, ended up writing my own app doing just so.

The result is called SonoSaver and can be found here in case you're interested: https://sonosaver.mrupp.ch/

I released it as shareware, but you can choose yourself of what you think it’s worth. And there’s a free version to test things out, first.

Also, I’m open to suggestions to enhance the app some more.

Cheers,
Michael

Userlevel 1

Completely forgot about this problem - just spent an hour making up a playlist for a party tonight and now I cannot export it to a usb or itunes to take to my friend. Ugh!!

Having to start again.  With itunes. Same music library on same PC.

I love my Sonos and my last speaker from 2017 is not going to be supported so I am afraid I will have to use i tunes and bluetooth in future.

 

Really feel let down by Sonos

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Me, too, I wanted to be on the save side and backup and export my precious Sonos playlists. And me, too, ended up writing my own app doing just so.

The result is called SonoSaver and can be found here in case you're interested: https://sonosaver.mrupp.ch/

I released it as shareware, but you can choose yourself of what you think it’s worth. And there’s a free version to test things out, first.

Also, I’m open to suggestions to enhance the app some more.

Cheers,
Michael

this worked perfectly. Highly recommend. If you have a blended system, S1 and S2 speakers.( way to go sonos as to not make them compatible. Idiots) Anyway, i have all my music on my NAS server, I created a folder called playlist. I’ve created several playlists in S1 and since they dont see each other i didnt want to try and recreate all the playlists. I used Michaels tool, copied the playlist to M3U, moved those into my playlist folder on my NAS, updated the library on both S1 and S2. Worked perfectly.Great Job Michael! 

Odd. I’ve never experienced an issue with, or needed to rebuild a Sonos playlist in the ten plus years  I’ve been using the system, across standard software updates, the change from S1 to S2, and several moves between various homes. Which isn’t to say you haven’t, just another datapoint. It does make me wonder if there’s something else at the root of the issue.

The only application I could see where this might be useful is transferring my playlist to someone else’s system, but then that would also imply them having access to either my local files on my HD or NAS, or the same streaming companies that I have, since the play list is merely a set of pointers to various locations to get/access music. And if it consists of music from one streaming company, it would be easier to build a play list with them directly, rather than doing it as a Sonos play list. 

Userlevel 1

Thanks guys.

In the end, as I was in a hurry, I left the Sonos window open, opened itunes in same screen and looked up each track from the Sonos playlist and made an itunes playlist. Highlighted that, copied to usb. Job done - the old fashioned way!!

Sonos could have made it so much easier.

I reckon I will be using Sonos less and less now and bluetoothing to my Bose soundbar.

Userlevel 7
Badge +23

So I ended up writing an app to do this, based on this thread: to export Sonos playlists, Favorites, Radio stations, and Alarms. It exports as human-readable (so you can manually do whatever you want with it) and machine-readable (for more advanced usage). Go to the iOS App Store and search for “sonos export playlist” and you’ll find it. Its free.

Userlevel 7
Badge +23

So I went to the iOS App Store and it wasn’t there! And I thought that my problem was gone.
 

Can’t explain why searching can’t find it (maybe it varies by country?), but try the name: “phonos plus”.

Nope, that is why you want it, not Sonos.

So for those of us who have a Sonos Move, you cannot play your Sonos playlists via the app when the device is connected via Bluetooth. So, it would be useful if you could export/print your playlist to duplicate the playlists in Amazon music/Apple Music/Spotify etc…..

Perfectly reasonable request as this IS a software limitation whichever way you look at it.

The export of a sonos playlist to deezer is not provided by the sonos developers, however this ist the way I did backup and transfer:

I highly recommend the SonoSaver, it worked like a charm - asked on Sunday mornig for the keyfile for the shareware https://sonosaver.mrupp.ch/ and recieved it an hour later.

The export of the csv-file and transfer to deezer https://www.deezer.com/explore/de/features/transfer-playlist/ (free of charge).

It took 10 Minutes and was very easy, thanks to Michael Rupp - great program, fair pricing!

So I went to the iOS App Store and it wasn’t there! And I thought that my problem was gone.
 

Can’t explain why searching can’t find it (maybe it varies by country?), but try the name: “phonos plus”.

That’s really cool. Thanks. 

Exporting a playlist? I would doubt it. It has been a request since the early 2000s, I would expect if it was on someone’s priority list, it would have been introduced by now. 

Why would Sonos be interested in doing that?

I can give Sonos one excellent reason to give their users to export their Sonos Playlists. (The main reason why I want it.) Because Sonos speakers are very problematic when it comes to updates. Causing you to have to rebuild your Playlists all over again. For this reason, it would be an excellent move by Sonos to allow you to export your Playlists to save on your computer to easily re-import the Playlist again when Sonos’ latest update caused you to have to re-install the app all over again and thus causing you to have to rebuild all your Playlists that were lost because Sonos feels it is best to not allow you to export your Sonos Playlist. Now, doesn't that sound like a good reason?

Why would Sonos be interested in doing that?

I can give Sonos one excellent reason to give their users to export their Sonos Playlists. (The main reason why I want it.) Because Sonos speakers are very problematic when it comes to updates.

That is nonsense.  I have never had a problem in ten years of using Sonos.   You need to sort out your shaky network

Causing you to have to rebuild your Playlists all over again. For this reason, it would be an excellent move by Sonos to allow you to export your Playlists to save on your computer to easily re-import the Playlist again when Sonos’ latest update caused you to have to re-install the app all over again and thus causing you to have to rebuild all your Playlists 

Just wrong… reinstalling the app has zero effect on Sonos playlists.  They are stored on the speakers.  You could uninstall all your apps and reinstall them afresh right now and your playlists would be unaffected.

 

I am not clear what people are looking for from an exported playlist.  Is it just a text listing that you can manually recreate elsewhere?  If so then that doesn’t seem a huge value-add.

Or is it an electronic set of music service URLs and local filepaths (potentially many different services and storage locations).  If so, which system(s) are you planning to use this with?  What format does it need to be in for the system to be able to use it?

Perhaps someone will enlighten me?

Hey I know am late but you can try this tool called MusConv. I have been using them for a long time for my playlist transfers and they work awesomely :) They support all major filetypes so compatibility is assured.

 

Hope i helped!

Wanting to export a Sonos queue or playlist is a perfectly reasonable request. 

My scenario would be when we have added tracks to a Sonos queue and want to save it to Tidal or Deezer or wherever for playing in the car or elsewhere at a later date. At the moment we are stuck with it existing in Sonos only. 

There are plenty of tools to transfer playlists between music services, so why not Sonos? Duh! 

Good job!  Anyway your scenario is exactly what brought me here looking for answers.  

Moderator Note: Modified in accordance with the Community Code of Conduct.

Why would Sonos be interested in doing that?

Good question! TLDR; Sonos would be interested in doing that because they want customers to mention their product when asked for a recommendation.

If you’re satisfied with that answer feel free to stop here otherwise, read on for the real-world example that led me to this thread and learn

How a seemingly insignificant feature impacts the long-term viability of a business

TLDR; I lost my data. They lost my trust. Now I can’t recommend Sonos. 

Here’s how - switching from Google Play Music to Spotify

  1. First, I went to Google Takeout and exported my playlists.
  2. I also have playlists created on my Sonos but unfortunately they aren’t synced to Google and can’t be exported or shared.
  3. Next, I signed up for Spotify and added it to Sonos.
  4. Then, I removed my Google Play account from Sonos.
  5. Now, My Sonos playlists are empty.
List of empty Sonos Playlists from removed Google Play Music account

 

The lesson I learned was don’t create Sonos playlists and don’t trust the Sonos app.

Why would Sonos care if they make money selling hardware?

How can me not using their free software have any measurable impact on their business? 

For the sake of simplicity, I will answer like this:

  • What Sonos wants is paying customers, because that’s how they make money.
  • What Sonos needs is advocates, because that’s how they grow their business.

In short, even though a customer (me) spent thousands of dollars on Sonos products in the past 4 years I can no longer enthusiastically recommend their product.

How does my lack of enthusiasm affect their business?

When someone asks if I recommend Sonos over Apple or Google or Alexa I won’t have an easy answer, because it depends - the hardware is reliable but if you’re the kind of person who loves to create playlists I have a warning - there is no way to export them and personally, I lost every playlist I ever created, every song I ever loved, every queue I ever saved, all of it. 

In summary: Sonos should be interested to add support for playlist exporting because they can’t grow their business if loyal customers won’t recommend their product.

Happy to answer any follow-up questions.

Yes, you would think a company like Sonos would have had such basic functionality implemented from launch.

 

Moderator Note: Modified in accordance with the Community Code of Conduct. 

Userlevel 7
Badge +22

Maybe you can help me here, I can’t find a way to export playlists from Bose, do you have anything that tells me how to do it? I can find import instructions but not export.

To all who have responded, odd and nonsense and to never had that issue in the 10 years you have been using Sonos.

I had to rebuild my Playlists at least 6 times in the last 6 months. Oh, and I “was” in direct contact with a Sonos Supervisor Tech Support representative. Who even had me try and do test Playlists. So, lucky for you that you had never had to rebuild a Playlist in your 10 years.

Though, I will say, maybe I would of never had to rebuild a Playlist once if Sonos would provide the ability to download and save a Playlist as a backup or allow a user to lock which particular Sonos speaker the app pulls the Playlists from. (I say this because my system containing two older Play:1 speakers and one newer Sonos One speaker. The Playlists works fine on the Sonos One speaker when it is the associated speaker. But when the app wants to use either of the older Sonos speakers as the associated speaker, then Playlist issues are present.) Note: I have the Sonos One speaker the closest proximity to the router and have tried a few times in disconnecting and reconnecting speakers to force the app to use the Sonos One as the associated speaker. But nothing seems to help.

Again, why is is such a travesty to allow a user to save or export a Playlist? Unless Sonos is fearful or doing something wrong in the first place.

The only way you lose playlists is if you factory reset every Sonos unit in your system, something which is never needed and is not recommended.  Any fix which results from a factory reset can be accomplished by a simple reboot.  On top of that a factory reset erases important diagnostic data which can help Sonos support in solving any problems not corrected by a reboot.

Bottom line - Stop with the factory resets.

 

https://en.community.sonos.com/troubleshooting-228999/factory-reset-what-you-need-to-know-6832540

So I ended up writing an app to do this, based on this thread: to export Sonos playlists, Favorites, Radio stations, and Alarms. It exports as human-readable (so you can manually do whatever you want with it) and machine-readable (for more advanced usage). Go to the iOS App Store and search for “sonos export playlist” and you’ll find it. Its free.

So I went to the iOS App Store and it wasn’t there! And I thought that my problem was gone.

Of course my real problem is the inability of the Sonos system to cope with a change to the music source without wrecking playlists. Off topic, so I’ll go somewhere else. So that’s two player/speaker systems that have lost the plot. The other one was Squeezebox. I wonder what’s to come?

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