While a lot of Sonos owners strictly play from music streaming services like Apple Music, Amazon Music, or Spotify, many others continue to use their Sonos products as they were originally designed: to listen to their personal music collection stored somewhere on their home network.
If that’s something you do regularly, you may have noticed that your album art doesn’t always display correctly in the Sonos app — or doesn’t display at all. This is especially true for the new Sonos web app, which launched alongside the redesigned mobile app in May 2024. At the time, the company said it intended to replace its desktop apps with the web app. That’s going to happen “in the coming months,” but for now, they’re still available.
The web app (which lets you access your Sonos system even when away from your home network) is fast and in my experience, often outperforms the mobile app for key features like search and being able to see what’s playing on your various Sonos speakers.
Unfortunately, the web app also has one area where it’s much worse: it doesn’t display album art from your personal music library. When I asked Sonos if this will be fixed, I was told that it had “no updates to share on if or when [album art] will be available.”
Still, all is not lost. There are three possible workarounds with both paid and free options. If you’re looking to solve problems with album art in the mobile app, skip to the last section as I’ve got a suggestion for that problem, too.
Use a free iBroadcast account
Until Sonos decides to update how the web app works, there’s no way to get it to display local music library album art. Each album is represented by the same generic icon. Music streaming services seem to avoid this problem by letting the web app access the artwork from the cloud.
However, you can upload your music collection to iBroadcast for free, effectively placing it in the cloud. The Sonos web app can then access the album artwork (and the music, of course) and display it correctly.
iBroadcast’s free tier lets you upload an unlimited number of albums as long as none of the individual tracks are larger than 1GB. Same thing goes for playlists. Is there a catch? Yes.
The one major limitation of the free tier is its streaming quality. All music is transcoded down to a 128kbps bitrate, which is the same quality that Spotify uses for its web-based player if you have a free account (Spotify Premium can stream up to 256kbps on the web and up to 328kbps on mobile).
But there’s also a major upside to the company’s paid tier (currently $4/month or $45/year): you can stream all of your music in original lossless quality as long as the device you’re streaming to is compatible with your music format(s). If it isn’t, iBroadcast will transcode down to a lossy 96-320kbps (you can choose the bitrate).
This makes the paid tier a great solution if you don’t already have an Apple Music subscription and you want to access to your music catalog when away from home as well as via Sonos.
Use Apple Music
- 1. Searching within Apple Music in the new Sonos search.
- 2. Searching the My Library section within Apple Music.
Speaking of Apple Music, that brings us to the second option for seeing album art.
All Apple Music users can add their personal libraries to the cloud at up to CD quality. This feature used to be called iTunes Match. You had to pay extra for it (back in the days when Apple didn’t have a dedicated streaming platform) but now it’s included in your Apple Music subscription.
As with iBroadcast, any albums to upload to Apple Music should show album artwork when viewed via either mobile or web Sonos apps.
You’ll be able to browse and search for your uploaded items with the My Library section (see images above.)
Use Plex
Beloved by cinephiles and audiophiles alike, Plex Media Sever can be used to organize (and remotely access) all kinds of personal content like movies, photos, and for the sake of this post, music.
If you don’t already have a Plex server set up, it takes a little time to do so, but it’s not hard and it can run on almost any computer or NAS. Once created, you can add your music to Plex, then add your Plex account to Sonos and all of your music (with artwork) should be accessible within the mobile and web apps.
The best part is that unlike iBroadcast, you don’t need to pay for lossless quality streaming. And unlike Apple Music, you’ll see your personal music as its own source and not mixed in with other content.
The catch — potentially — is that even though the Plex server and your Sonos speakers are on the same network, Sonos actually accesses your Plex content via the cloud. This means you need to set up remote access on your Plex server, which can get a bit tricky, especially if your ISP doesn’t use static IP addresses.
Still, if you can get it working, it might be the best solution for you.
Try Bliss
- 1. Bliss showing albums with missing artwork …
- 2. … and albums with valid artwork.
Now and then, our music library album artwork won’t display correctly even inside the mobile Sonos app. There are all kinds of reasons why this can happen, but the root cause is usually missing images. Album artwork is often stored as its own .jpg file inside the folder that contains all of the tracks, but it can also be embedded into the individual track files.
Finding and fixing these problems can be done manually, using freely available tools. But depending on the number of broken albums, it could take a very long time to do so.
If you feel like outsourcing the task, Bliss is an interesting option. Once you download the software, it scans your entire music library looking for a variety of potential issues like broken file paths, or inconsistent file naming, and (most importantly) missing or incorrect artwork.
It can also fix these errors automatically, which is great. But (here’s the catch) you need to pay per fix, or pay a one-time fee for an unlimited number of fixes. Currently, Bliss charges $16 for 250 fixes, $49 for 2,500 fixes, or $79 for unlimited fixes.
Is it worth it? Only you can decide what your time is worth, but I’ve migrated the location of my music collection several times over the years (and added to it fairly regularly) and each time, there was some weirdness that Bliss was able to find and fix.
