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Sort playlist by date added

  • 14 December 2019
  • 14 replies
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Userlevel 1

Hi pals,

is there an option to sort a playlist “upside down” meaning that the songs least added to a spotify playlist will be at the top?

I recently found this feature in the spotify app itself but did not see any equivalent in the SONOS app.

As my “Star rated” playlist on spotify contains roughly 1000 songs it would be handy to get faster to the tracks I recently added.

Thank you in advance!

Chris 

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Best answer by Ryan S 17 December 2019, 22:08

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14 replies

Userlevel 7
Badge +26

Hi Chris, there isn’t an option to control the sort of the display for playlists within Sonos, but I’ll pass along the request for you to the team. They love hearing what people are looking for, but can’t always promise to be able to change things. 

Userlevel 7
Badge +23

Sonos have no idea when you added a song to Spotify, and no ability to sort anything, so chances of this are close to zero. Spotify on the other hand do know this stuff, so ask them for the feature.

Userlevel 2

Well it would then just be a matter for Spotify to pass this date information through the web services used by Sonos to pull the playlist… CR needs to come from Sonos to Spotify!

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This is also an issue for youtube music playlists. It's actually infuriating. The playlists feature of the sonos app is terribly implemented actually. It's so.... Option less. 

I upvote this post. 

The option is avaliable in the api! 

I have trust in you! You can implement this for us! 

Many thanks 

Userlevel 7
Badge +23
  1. Sonos have no idea what date anything is added or created for music service items
  2. Sonos have never implemeted the sorting of anything, ever, anywhere, for many reasons
  3. This is Spotify’s problem to solve as they know #1 and can easily do #2 in their service
  1. Sonos have no idea what date anything is added or created for music service items
  2. Sonos have never implemeted the sorting of anything, ever, anywhere, for many reasons
  3. This is Spotify’s problem to solve as they know #1 and can easily do #2 in their service


Can you elaborate on this? The required information (`added_at`) is available via the Spotify API:

https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/reference/object-model/#playlist-track-object

Are you suggesting that Spotify should create unique playlists for each desired ordering? What exactly should we request of Spotify here?

And Sonos does allow you to sort your queue by manually moving items, but that’s pretty rudimentary.  Surely basic ordering operations are a primary requirement for a device which is primarily for music playback? For what reason wouldn’t they implement this?

 

Userlevel 7
Badge +23


Can you elaborate on this? The required information (`added_at`) is available via the Spotify API:

https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/reference/object-model/#playlist-track-object

 

Sonos require all music services to expose their content via their own api called SMAPI. This is so Sonos themselves don’t have to use 70 different music service APIs themselves (many years ago they did and it was unscalable), Spotify themselves created their SMAPI service, and they choose exactly how to deliver their own content.

The SMAPI API has no property for “added_at”, and Sonos have never attempted to sort third party content anyway, for so many reasons. Any sorting must be done by the music provider, as only they have the underlying data, and only they can efficiently expose a sorted list through pagination.

For more about SMAPI, see https://developer.sonos.com/build/content-service-get-started/

Ok, thanks for the info.

However, if Sonos’ SMAPI spec doesn’t have an `added_ad` property, how can Spotify implement it?

Sonos also do provide a shuffle and manual reorder capability, so it’s not true that they don’t do any sorting. I think in this instance, simply providing a reverse playlist option would be sufficient, and wouldn’t require further metadata. It appears that the current implementations for ‘shuffle’ and ‘play all’ pull the entire list into the queue, so in terms of pagination simply adding a ‘reverse’ option wouldn’t change anything.  I’ll create a new topic here if there isn’t one already.

 

Userlevel 7
Badge +23

Spotify need to provide a way of presenting their lists in the opposite order. Only they have access to the necessary data.

Sonos support shuffling and editing their queue only, which is very different to sorting the lists that the music services provide. Both operations are easy to support on large lists with the limited memory on the older devices, but a real Sort operation is not. With S2 there are more possibilities I guess, but no sign of changes in this area so far.

Yep, but I’m suggesting they should add the ‘reverse’ option to the Sonos queue.  So, for example, you could populate the Sonos queue from the Spotify Songs list, and then reverse it there.

 

Userlevel 7
Badge +23

Hmm that’s a reasonable idea.

Sonos have never attempted to sort third party content anyway, for so many reasons

 

I can literally not think of a single reason other than “can’t be bothered” why I shouldn’t be able to sort playlists by first letter. And yet, here we are.

 

Looking at the comments on the thread, it is either that the task is incredibly complicated (unlike the Java sort facility) or else they’ve got no interest in assisting. After the hoo-hah of system bricking I decided that Sonos has no idea of what their customers want. This reinforces that feeling.

It’s a shame that we’ve invested so heavily in Sonos, as the alternatives don’t quite do the job, but offer better support...