Issue using Roon with a Naim Core (edited metadata)

When are Roon and Naim going to get their acts together? It’s been going on too long now.
I rip CDs to WAV on my Naim Core, and sometimes have to add or edit to get the correct metadata, especially for rare CDs.
On a Naim Core, this edited data is apparently kept in a file that Roon apparently doesn’t look at, and I understand that Roon uses info from some other database, so some of my most highly prized, rare CD rips don’t show up at all when using Roon.
I think quite a lot of Naim users are also Roon users. Help is desperately needed on this, it’s an integration issue which only the two companies can solve.

Certainly won’t be solved by Roon. Naim won’t solve it either until they decide to do the equivalent of Innuos 2/Sense. Wish there were a more satisfactory answer than that but I suspect there simply isn’t.

Roon fills a gap which will inevitably shrink as each manufacturers expands their closed ecosystem. Those lifetime memberships won’t look so great then.

Roon uses its own source of metadata by default. Obviously it needs to be able to identify the album accurately so if it can’t recognise your rare CDs it could be that they are missing from the database.
You can optionally set Roon to use you own metadata instead if you prefer. I would strongly recommend using FLAC instead of WAV to store your music files as the metadata will be more easily accessible by non-Naim servers.

Indeed, but it does much more than that, especially for seamless content delivery to so many disparate devices. Are you seeing a trend towards more closed systems ?

I’ll be in the green with that lifetime (it only takes five years) long before the Naim app does what Roon does :slight_smile:
I would have preferred not to need Roon in the first place, but the Naim app is so far away from what I need, I had no choice.

And that’s just for pure library management and even before we consider that proprietary, closed multiroom will never cover multiroom needs in their entirety, unless Naim starts to sell battery powered speakers I can use in the bathroom

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If you copy the ripped wavs to Roon (or point Roon to the Core’s exported file storage) your metadata is not in there, so Roon must rely on its own database. This may or may not work. If not, Roon shows “unidentified” in the album view. Click on that and Roon let’s you choose what album it is (or you can search for it), if it knows something that looks similar to that album at all. (Else, you can also edit the data completely within Roon)

If you rip to FLAC instead, your own metadata is in the file, which will help Roon identify it.

You probably can’t expect Roon to implement an understanding for a multitude of whatever proprietary, non-standard file formats the individual manufacturers implemented for separate metadata storage, like the one Naim did for the wav metadata.

Roon plus Naim Core plus ripping to wav is simply not a combination that works smoothly in more complex cases with very rare music. If using Roon, an actual Roon Core makes much more sense in my opinion.

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The issue is Naim chose proprietary method of storing metadata because Wav metadata is not unified or read by many apps. Roon goes by the file names if no metadata present which doesn’t give it a huge amount to go on to get a match and it can’t use the Cores. Metadata. If they exist in music brainz or Roons other metadata sources then you should be able to manually get it to match in Roon . It’s no fun but you can get it to identify this way.

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