Answered

Playlists on MacOS Big Sur: Sorting, song choices made

  • 4 November 2021
  • 3 replies
  • 58 views

Badge

After the debacle with MacOS Catalina and playlists, I have gotten the update of playlists to work ok - when I add songs and update the Sonos library, the new songs do appear in the playlists (if I remember to do the updates from the Mac, that is - not if I do it from, say, the iPad controller).

So far, so good.

But there seems to be two things that the Sonos system does not respect:

  • Sort order of playlists
    My playlists are invariably set to sort by song title and appear so in the Music app library on the Mac. Yet, in the importde playlists on Sonos, the new songs are simply concatenated to the bottom of the playlists, out of any order (except latest in).
     
  • Choices made for songs via Music / View Info
    I have a few songs that I have changed volume for in the Music app or, more importantly, changed start and end times for. These edits are not seen by Sonos. I’d relly rather not have to do manual music file editing…

Any comments - any possibiliites to fix these things (or teach me how to make it work)?

icon

Best answer by James L. 5 November 2021, 09:51

View original

This topic has been closed for further comments. You can use the search bar to find a similar topic, or create a new one by clicking Create Topic at the top of the page.

3 replies

Badge +17

Hi @madseno,

 

You’ve raised a couple of issues here so let me address them individually:-

 

  • Sort order of playlists
    My playlists are invariably set to sort by song title and appear so in the Music app library on the Mac. Yet, in the importde playlists on Sonos, the new songs are simply concatenated to the bottom of the playlists, out of any order (except latest in).
  • My understanding of how playlists are imported is that it’s based on the order of the songs added to the playlist. Sonos will read the contents of your iTunes Music Library.xml file which contains all of the playlist information, and we import those entries chronologically. I don’t believe there’s a simple way to change the sorting here, other than by editing the xml file directly.

 

  • Choices made for songs via Music / View Info
    I have a few songs that I have changed volume for in the Music app or, more importantly, changed start and end times for. These edits are not seen by Sonos. I’d relly rather not have to do manual music file editing…

I understand here that you’ve made volume changes inside the Music app, but not directly into the files metadata via ReplayGain or iTunNorm tags. Those changes would only be reflected inside of the Music app, and not through third-party players, such as Sonos. You would need to ensure that the tracks have these tags so that Sonos can follow the volume adjustments of the individual files.

 

I hope I understood your questions correctly. Do let me know if you have anything else we can help with.

Badge

The volume/file changes I can sort of live with and accet - but the sorting really sucks.

It would be very, very appreciated either reading them correctly or adding a way to sort any given playlist.

There is no way I’m going to manually run two separate playlist sets on 9000+ songs...

Hi @madseno I understand your frustration. Have you tried to export the playlists to the iTunes folder on your Mac? This should create an xml (or m3u) file with the correct order. If you are storing the files on a NAS, then you might consider to use the ‘Export for iTunes‘ tool. I have been using this tool successfully and explained this on my blog. Hope this helps.