When a Various Artists album is successfully ripped by the Uniti Core and is able to find the metadata it also displays Track artist. When it cannot find the metadata it only displays Track Nos, which I can then edit with the App. It does not display Track Artist. Is it possible to add a track artist with the App? If so, How?
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Unfortunately not, with the Naim App.
As you’ve found, it only allows editing of the most basic ‘top level’ metadata fields: Artist, Album, Track, Genre …
An alternative is to move the ripped files away from the MQ folder (best to do a backup and move those files to another location, be that the Downloads folder or another Share say on a NAS) and then work on those files with some tagging software, eg Metadatics and/or SongKong….this will allow you to populate the tagging fields not only with the basic top level fields and others such as Track Artist, but also with potentially extensive metadata and in exactly the fashion you may require……
The problem remains however, is that the Core and in combination with the Naim App is still crippled in what it will present and what info from these tagged fields it will display……
Other UPnP servers eg Minimserver, Asset, etc will happily use, work with and present these metadata fields all correctly….but not Naim’s current – and legacy – solutions……
It’s been a bugbear of mine right from the days of the UnitiServe/HDX/NS0x and it’s never really improved….A lot of albums now will tag individual tracks with Featuring Artist etc, which I personally like to see under a Track name, but there’s no way the Naim App will honour this whilst also having the overall Album Artist tag correctly grouping the tracks together….If you tag a track with another Artist, the album then becomes a Various…which it shouldn’t…! ITunes had this solved something like 20yrs ago…!
I keep hoping improved metadata handling and presentation will come to the Core and App, but after years there seems to be no real development or urge to do so from the software team……
SC
As SC says, the metadata editing capabilities are sadly woefully inadequate. In my case, I copy the files out of the MQ store, convert them to FLAC (if they are in WAV format) using DB Poweramp’s media converter, and then use a metadata editor (the excellent MP3tag in my case, on both my Mac and PC) to fix up the artists etc.
MP3tag is (like many other editors) able to pull in metadata from external sources such as musicbrains and Discogs, and do the updates automatically. I also find it helpful sometimes to use MP3tag to rename the files using the updated metadata.
I then copy the updated files back to my share (or you can use the downloads folder on the core if you don’t have a separate share).
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We gave up using the naim app to edit metadata after trying to fix one CD! An Opera CD which wasn’t recognised, and which would have taken an age to enter manually, but without access to any of the tags really required as described above.
The support for tags is so limited, it’s only suitable for basic single artist CDs.
However, since we use a NAS area as our music store the problem is easily solved. We now simply run MusicBrainz Picard over all rips which fixes metadata, covers extended tagging etc.
The Core also had problems with multi CD albums. Can’t recall if it was tagging or the uPNP server presentation which was the issue, but it didn’t work properly. Again not an issue for us because our NAS runs Asset so we just browse via that superior interface after fixing via Picard.
The Core is a great piece of hardware let down by poor software.
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Fully agree.
I’ve never really understood it – I presumed it was the perfect chance (and idea) to rebirth the US/HDX etc in so many ways…yet it had something of a less than ideal launch, which was arguably premature…and then nothing really of note re software/firmware development ever since, certainly in terms of adding features and metadata UI……
Though, after the past few weeks I’ve had, my patience is being stretched by the hardware also…! 
SC
Re Multi CD Albums – do you mean the fact that the Core forces you to have [Disc 1], [Disc 2] etc in the Title, therefore effectively splitting the album into two or more parts…? Worse still is that I think if you edit those titles and remove the ‘Disc’ text, one of the ‘albums’ will disappear as the Core thinks it’s the same album, a bit like when it will overwrite an existing rip when you rip another copy of an album, which could well be a different edition or something….
Annoys me also, though I know some users prefer things that way…
Such a simple thing to handle differently by reading the Disc No Tag….All multi albums I have in iTunes are handled well in this way – One main ‘block’ for the whole album, but each ‘disc’ split into separate panes in the UI….Visually far more effective and so much easier to use IMO….
SC
Why it can’t just use DISCNUMBER and DISCTOTAL tags, who knows.
At least I think those are the tags, I’d have to check what we’ve got Picard set up to use.
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