I hope this is not a dumb question, but I seem to have a problem with Sonos not being able to read certain M4A metadata, namely Album and Title.
I use a little external hardrive connected to a Fritzbox as a poor man's NAS. The NAS stores a copy of my digital files and is hooked up to my Sonos system. The formats I use are lossless FLAC, MP3, M4A from iTunes (all of them bought in the store) and self generated M4A (basically I am ripping audio from a streaming service as a speed up workaround to digitize my records).
I would say 99,9% of my files have good tag quality.
Sonos reads tags just fine from everything EXCEPT the self-generated M4A files. There I only can find an album by browsing through the folder structure. And if I have several albums from an artist, they are shown on a flat level. It's a mess.
The strange thing - when I change tags from my itunes m4a collection via mp3tag, the changes are reflected just fine in Sonos.
Probably this problem is a Sonos issue (foobar, vlc etc.. read the data just fine too), but before I contact their support I wanted to check if anybody in this forum had this experience before.
Or is there a possibility to completely regenerate the m4a wrapper? If possible I would like to avoid a further transcoding.
I used a software called Audfree, which rips audio from streaming services. I am using it to get digital copies of the records that don't have a download code.
MP3Tag (and foobar and vlc) did read the "Title" and "Album" tags just fine but Sonos did not like this type.
It was also possible to change the content of the tags with mp3tag, but this did not fix Sonos either.
In the end I used ffmpeg and a .bat script from here to re-wrap the original files. The metadata was preserved and now Sonos reads Album and Title information.
If you are interested in finding out the reason for the Sonos behaviour, you could share 1 x track where Sonos can't read the TITLE and ALBUM and 1 x track where Sonos reads this information as expected.
The example files you've provided are not erroneous per se. The only differences I've noticed are different Codec IDs (mp42/isom on the bad, and M4A /isom/iso2 on the good).
If the software you're using also converts to MP3, you might circumvent the issue with Sonos.
Thank you Florian for looking into it. MP3 would be an option, but I understood that the format of the streaming provider is also mp4 based and I did not want to trigger another cross-conversion (though it is not transparent if the Audfree "ripping" process itself is generating a cross-conversion too). Is the Codec ID something I could bring up with Sonos Support? In the end they are the only link in the chain that cannot deal with the metadata correctly.
Your software makes uncompressed recordings and later converts the recorded tracks to the format you define. The uncompressed recordings cannot be better in quality than the lossy source format.
What you could do:
Tell your software to record in an uncompresses lossless format (WAVE or FLAC) and later convert it youself in seperate process with a converter of your choice to the format you like and which does not make problems with Sonos.
I would ask the Sonos Support (or in the Sonos support forum) if they are aware of this problem.
Maybe other Audfree & Sonos users have the same problem and an idea how to workaround it with minimum effort?
I’m not quite sure I understand this part of your process. So you own the CDs, but don’t want to go through the process of ripping them yourself - so using some other process to get the same music from an online source is what you are doing instead? But now you are spending time trying to correct that method, and getting results that aren’t ideal.
I would have to suggest you rethink this, and work with the materials you have at hand. Rip the CDs you own in a lossless format. Choose one that meets your needs, I recommend either FLAC (if no Apple interface is planned) or ALAC (Apple friendly). The upfront effort will be worth the work.
No, my CD's are already ripped in lossless FLAC. It is about the vinyl records for which I don't have a download code. I used to record directly from the record player in the past, but it is quite work intensive and the result is not great. My workaround is to "rip" this music from a streaming service.
That makes a lot of sense. A lossless copy of a lossy source format is better than a re-encoding and the HDD space is really not an issue. Thanks for the tip.
