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Request for sorting options for Apple Music Albums - by Artist / Date Added / Title

  • July 5, 2024
  • 3 replies
  • 189 views
S
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Hi, I just joined the Sonos world with purchase of a Sonos Port. This was triggered by the recent update supporting Lossless streaming from Apple Music - great job Sonos.

So far I’m very pleased with the operation / functionality, no moaning from me about the App,  seems to work fine.

I’m impressed that it maintains the bulk of the capabilities of the native Apple Music App.

One thing I would like to request however is the ability to choose the sort order specifically for the Album list. At the moment it only sorts by Title, my preference when using the Apple App was to sort by Artist name, this would more logically group albums together by Artist. Usually when searching for something to play I’d choose by the Artist. Hopefully the API integration with Apple will allow you to implement this without too much trouble.

Thanks for now.

 

Ken_Griffiths
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3 replies

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  • ings
  • Enthusiast II
  • July 5, 2024

YMMV but if I want advanced functionality, I use the iOS Apple Music app and AirPlay it to Sonos, rather than using the more basic Sonos app functionality. Plus this way you get music controls on the phone’s lock screen (which as documented elsewhere, Sonos is unable to provide).

In fact now that I think of it, I rarely use the Sonos app anymore for day to day listening. YMMV.

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  • speedyuk
  • Author
  • Contributor II
  • July 6, 2024

Hi @ings thanks for your reply. The reason getting a Sonos Port now is the native support of Lossless streaming for Apple Music. I believe it is still the case that if you use AirPlay 2 the ‘transport’ from iOS device to the Sonos Port in my case will be AAC 256k encoded. I don’t want any compression in the signal path, the streaming is feeding my main lounge Hi-Fi hence the insistence on maintaining the best quality. If I was prepared to use AirPlay I could have gone this route a while ago with other controllers.

One the Album sorting topic I see after more searching this has been raised a few times in the past and from quite some time ago. The only ‘solution’ being to use the Artist option as the top level and drill down to Albums under that. This is not as convenient for ‘browsing’ as using the Album route from my experience using the native Apple Music App. I hope Sonos do get round to implementing the additional sorting options especially now that it is a new App.

One other thing that would be very useful is a Letter index to allow you to jump to a starting Letter in the lists. With large libraries it takes quite a while to scroll through a big list to get to content at the end.

Thanks again.

 

 

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  • ings
  • Enthusiast II
  • July 6, 2024

I don’t want any compression in the signal path, the streaming is feeding my main lounge Hi-Fi hence the insistence on maintaining the best quality.

I also own a Port, which plays through full range tower speakers, so I understand your reasoning. Make sense.

There’s a loose end though. With video AirPlay to an Apple TV, the streaming URL (and not the video stream itself) is sent to the Apple TV, which does the actual streaming. I have seen people claim this is also how (now, in 2024) audio AirPlay now works, or can work, too. I have seen other people say no, your iPhone or iPad still (now, in 2024) converts the lossless stream to AAC and then streams the AAC bits to the target device (like a Port). I don’t know which is true, and I’m too lazy 😀 to go read Apple’s AirPlay developer documentation. I’d love to find an authoritative technical article about this. (Plus the answer may be very different if you use a different music service.)

Finally, it appears to be true that if you use an Apple TV to directly stream lossless Apple Music (no AirPlay involved) then it will indeed be lossless (and it also supports Atmos (Spatial) audio if you have a surround system). This is the configuration some lossless/spatial enthusiasts use.

Good luck! Cheers!

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