Feature Request: Search to correctly return compilation albums in Artist results

Sonos support today requested a further diagnostic and on receipt responded: 

...I’ve checked internally regarding this specific issue, and at the moment it is under active investigation as we work to understand what’s leading to this behavior in search, especially around “Various Artists” results. Unfortunately, I don’t have an ETA to share yet, we’re still investigating the root cause so we can implement a proper fix.

Also they are aware of this and related threads so hopefully some resolutions to the various search issues will be identified soon.

Once again I've only good things to say about the people in support 👍

So now TOTALLY broken, across Android AND Windows 11.

Just noticed that with latest windows controller this is broken there now too. Only returns a small subset of what it should and Android still returns nothing!

Phonos results are now the same as the Sonos Windows app across Android and Windows.

Is this progress, a sign of progress or a backwards step 🤔 I suspect the latter!!!

Mind you I suppose the desktop app and Phonos are still marginally better!

Apologies for a long post but new observations...

As a baseline:

I have many 'Various Artists' albums spread across .flac and .mp3 formats - about 95/5. All tracks in the albums are:

* Tagged with 'Artist -> <discrete track artist>'
* Tagged with 'Album Artist -> Various Artists' 
* 'Compilation -> Yes' (Yes = 1 = True depending on interrogation software) 
* Albums are stored in '.../Various Artists/<Album>/<Track>.<format>'
* Albums are grouped by 'Both'

I have desktop and 3 party apps running on Win11 and Android. All are up to date and current, as are speakers and Win11 OS and current Android @ 13, 14 and 17. All speakers are current generation s2. In short all is as recommended, checked and confirmed.

Searching for 'Various Artists' albums has been working in the desktop Win11/3rd party and 3rd party Android apps (old architecture) without issue for ever. The Android Sonos app, however, started failing to return results sometime (a long time) ago...

Recent changes somewhere in the Sonos firmware/software also broke this in the working Sonos and 3rd party Win11 and Android apps, across the board. I would posit it was firmware.

In the light of this, and having a spare wet and rainy afternoon I've been investigating further.

Read on...

Varying the grouping of albums across 'iTunes Compilations', 'Album artists' and 'Both' and searching for 'Various' or 'Various Artists':

* .mp3 albums are indexed/returned correctly
* .flac albums are ignored
* .mp3 albums are ignored when 'Group albums by' is set to 'iTunes Compilations'

Odd, seems to be an issue there. Worth reiterating too that the search results consistently fail across Sonos and 3rd party apps, Sonos Android app fails across all variations.

I further played about with the tagging:

* Setting 'Compilation -> No' (No = 0 = False depending on interrogation software)
* Using an alternative wording to 'Various Artists'

These variations had no impact. So I:

* Removed the 'Compilation' tag completely from all .flac files 
* Set 'Group albums by' to 'Album artists'

Re-indexing now shows all albums in a search for 'Various Artists' in the old architecture Sonos and 3rd party apps, Win11 or Android with the Sonos Android app still returning nothing for albums.

In summary it would seem that:

* The 'Compilation' tag for .flac files somehow excludes them from indexing/search results
* The 'Compilation' tag for .mp3 files has no impact and seems to be ignored

and still the index/search functionality of Sonos app, on the new architecture, remains badly broken. With results consistently failing to return anything for 'Various Artists' albums regardless of format, settings or tagging.

Please give us a fix... it is well beyond due!

To add to the strangeness of searching local Music Library multi artist albums…

I use three other names for “Album Artist” besides “Various Artists”. Soundtrack, Halloween and Xmas. These are all multi artist albums with “Album Artist” using one of those three and “Artist” is the track artist.

The search result on one of those yields a screen with categories “Albums >”, “Songs >” and “Other >”  at the bottom (note no “Artists >” at the top). Below “Other >” is a selection for what was searched for (ie “Soundtrack/ Other >”) . Selecting that (“Soundtrack/ Other >), gets a screen that says “Soundtrack” at the top and has a selection line “Soundtrack >”. Selecting this “Soundtrack >” shows a list of all the “Album Artist”=”Soundtrack” albums.

Search for Xmas, scroll down to “Other >”. Select “Xmas/ Other”. Select Xmas. Get a list of all Album Artist = Xmas albums.

Search for Halloween, scroll down to “Other >”. Select “Halloween/ Other”. Select Halloween. Get a list of all Album Artist = Halloween albums.

Searching on any of these works as expected using any 3rd party app or desktop controller. It’s just the S2 mobile apps that do this.

And searching for “Various Artists” continues to not work at all.