• Add Itunes Library To Sonos Mac
• Connect Sonos To Itunes Library
• Transfer Itunes Playlist To Sonos

As I blogged last week, I love my new Sonos Play:1 music speaker. It’s such an elegant and simple way to play my music. But it has forced me to tame the iTunes monster.

How to Add Your Music Library to Your Sonos System. How to Create Playlists in iTunes 2015 - iTunes Playlist - Free & Easy. How to add music to iTunes library with three different methods explained. Use iTunes Store, Apple Music, or add your own tunes!

The reason? The Sonos system won’t play music from iCloud. Any music in your iTunes music library has to be on your device rather than the cloud. (By contrast, Spotify and other streaming services work fine, although Spotify has proved temperamental with Sonos.) This revelation showed how much of my 10 year iTunes collection is in the cloud.

This was a shock. Many of my favourite albums had tracks missing. Some had just a handful of songs. What happened to them? I wondered if I had deleted multiple copies of songs years ago to save hard disc space of my old computer, without realising I was shredding albums. Whatever the reason, it cost me a lot of time ripping the missing songs again.

The next surprise was that iTunes had split many albums into multiple separate albums. It took a while to understand what was going on. I discovered that it was all down to metadata – the information that iTunes holds about the music. Here are a few key lessons:

Check the info iTunes has about the album. (‘Get Info’ when the album is highlighted – see screenshot below.)

I discovered that in many cases iTunes had different info in the key boxes for the same album. For example, I found that albums with several CDs had ‘disc one’, ‘disc 2’ etc in the album title. This meant that iTunes assumed they were different albums. Deleting the disc number from the album title meant iTunes now recognised them as a single album. See below.

Add Itunes Library To Sonos Mac

Delete the disc number

The next lesson was that some tracks mysteriously had different info in the crucial boxes. In the example below, iTunes has ‘The BRIT Awards 2014’ and ‘BRIT Awards 2014’ for the same album. That missing definite article is enough to separate the tracks into different records. I had to go into the Info box and edit the entries to ensure they were consistent.

The other complication was that many albums include more than one artist and composer – even if it’s technically not a compilation album. Again, I had to edit for consistency to merge an album into the original single album. (If it is a compilation, you should ensure the box confirming it is a compilation is ticked.)

Finally, and less importantly, iTunes seems less able to provide album cover artwork these days. You can ask it nicely, as shown below:

Ask iTunes for album covers…

But in my experience, this rarely provides the right cover, unless you bought the album from iTunes. For a lot of compilation records, it supplied an image for one of the individual tracks. Here, I had to look to eBay, Google or Amazon for an image of the record’s cover, which I then saved as a screenshot. I then went into the Get Info tab (see the earlier screenshot) and clicked the Artwork tab to attach the true image.

It’s taken many hours but my iTunes library is now in a fit state. The mystery is why iTunes is so much more temperamental than when I started using it exactly 10 years ago. It’s a shame that Apple and the record companies don’t make it easier. But then why would they make it easy for us to enjoy our own music rather than prompting us to pay to download it again?

PS: ripping my old CDs showed how much we paid for music in the 1980s. Record companies typically charged £13 for an album. Back then, I wanted the Beatles blue and red compilation records but wasn’t prepared to pay £30 for each of them, so I bought the vinyl versions… The digital revolution has saved us a lot of money, even before you consider the great value of streaming services like Spotify.

If you need to consolidate files of iTunes, you should know what consolidate files do in iTunes. In order to have a better management for the media files of iTunes library, you can also use Tipard iPhone Transfer Ultimate to combine or merge files of iTunes according to your requirement.

What does consolidate library mean in iTunes

When you choose to consolidate your iTunes library, it will create copies of all the media files in your library into a single folder on the hard driver you running iTunes. The specific methods to consolidate iTunes library might be vary slightly because of the operation systems.

How to consolidate iTunes library

1. Launch iTunes and click the 'File' to access the pull down menu. Select the 'Add to Library' on Mac or 'Add Folder to Library' on Windows.

2. Click the 'Select Folder', import and consolidate files into iTunes. You can choose the folder to add the media files from your computer to iTunes.

3. When you import files to iTunes library, you only index the media files instead of copying the media files to iTunes.

Connect Sonos To Itunes Library

4. Choose the 'File', select the 'Library' option and click the 'Organize Library' option.

5. Check the box next to 'Consolidate files' and click the 'OK' button. And then iTunes will copy all media files that indexed in iTunes library.

Better solution to consolidate files of iTunes library

When you remove all the files of iTunes library, you have to rebuild iTunes library. It will copy all the music into the iTunes music folder, which cannot be done.

In order to combine files of iTunes library as your requirement, you can use Tipard iPhone Transfer Ultimate to create your own playlist on iPhone and manage the files of iTunes.

How to consolidate files of iTunes library with Tipard iPhone Transfer Ultimate

When you install the latest version of Tipard iPhone Transfer Ultimate, you can launch the program to connect iPhone with the USB connector.

1. Copy iDevice to iTunes.

When you click the 'To iTunes' button, you can transfer the new files from iTunes to combine iTunes library.

When you need to consolidate the iTunes files to external device, you can simply click the 'To Folder' to export the files easily.

• Tipard iPhone Transfer Ultimate can transfer media files to consolidate iTunes library to external devices. You can manage the iTunes files according to your own requirement. Just download the trial version to learn more detail about the program.

Transfer Itunes Playlist To Sonos

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