I’m generally very happy with the Naim app. I use Qobuz for streaming and the various playlists, Discover sections and favourites are all sync’d and shown correctly, and the resolution is also shown to select hi-res where available over regular.
My only serious issue is the lack of visibility of Genre – as far I can tell Genre is not shown anywhere in Naim app. Am I missing something?
QUESTION: Is there anywhere the genre of an album is visible?
I can filter lists of course, but if I filter on two or more genres I can’t figure out any way at all to know which genre an individual item is – it’s definitely not in any lists (that I can see?), but even within the album information I can’t see genre.
I appreciate there are lots of ways of using the app, but often I want to brows what’s new generally in my preferred genres, but probably know I’m in the mood to play a particular type of music. And sometimes I’m simply curious about how a particular – possibly ambiguous – artist is classified – I end up going elsewhere to view this rather than filtering one genre, seeing if the album’s there, filtering a different genre, seeing if the album’s there, etc.
(I have a separate confusion around whether, when using the Qobuz app on an iPad and using Airplay to play it on my Naim NDX2, the NDX2 is itself streaming directly from the source, or whether my iPad is doing the streaming / decoding and then sending audio information to the NDX2. Which extends to can Airplay use hi-res? I ask this because sometimes I’ll just use the Qobuz app on my iPad for convenience because I can then see the genre information I’m interested in, listen to a snippet of a few new albums, and then I’ll go back to the Naim app to actually play whichever one caught my ear.)
Genre is visible in the “Servers” list, but I don’t believe anywhere else. I’m using a Naim Uniti Core as a music server, so if you’re using a different uPNP server you might get different listings.
When you play Qobuz from your phone or iPad to the NDX2 over Airplay, the music is being streamed from your phone, which will limit sound quality - you’ll get better sound quality when playing from Qobuz through the Naim app.
Tidal, by comparison, supports “Tidal Connect”, where the Tidal app will instruct the NDX2 which tracks to stream directly
But the OP was asking about streaming from Qobuz. Asset UPnP only serves from local storage AFAIK. If there is a way to display and choose genre within the Naim (sorry, Focal) app when using Qobuz, it’s far from obvious. It’s a strange omission as all the other control points I’ve tried (Auralic, Linn, Lumin) allow this.
If the OP is still following this thread, could I suggest they post in the newly resurrected Feature request thread.
Thanks all. As noted I use Qobuz for streaming so other use cases not relevant.
Alas it seems I’m not missing anything and there is no way at all anywhere to view genre for Qobuz content, though it can determined by filtering on individual genres and seeing what appears and what doesn’t.
@PeakMan I also find it a very odd (and frustrating, to me) omission. I recognise that seemingly trivial features can sometimes be very messy to implement behind the scenes, but… It seems an obvious feature, to me at least.
I had noticed the ‘feature request’ thread so I’ll add this there and keep my fingers crossed.
