The problem is that the hardware of the UnitiCore is fine but its software is miserable. Another problem is that many dealers do not appear to know the limitations of the Core and do not inform perspective buyers properly. The absence of a detailed user guide also does not help. The UnitiServe came with a detailed user guide. I read it carefully some years ago and it was immediately clear that the Serve was not for me. With the Core, it is impossible to know what one is buying before buying it.
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Final update. I decided to load the Core ripped ‘unknown’ re-edited CDs to a SD card and to plug that into the Core when I am using my other system which is likely to be temporary. In the end SongKong wasn’t that helpful as it, like the Core, uses MusicBrainz and hence had the similar difficulties with finding the metadata as the Core did so a lot of manual edits again! Unfortunately off the mainstream jazz is not well supported by these tagging software solutions. I have backed up the Core and these edited CDs so hopefully won’t have to do these edits again! And lastly SongKong support were excellent in helping me use their software with this.
I notice there are a few references to Gracenote in this thread as a good metadata source. On the rare occasions when my Unitiserve has been unable to find metadata, I’ve used iTunes to rip, and then transferred to the Downloads folder. I have never found an album that iTunes/Apple Music couldn’t identify, and it uses Gracenote.
Chris,
Thanks. I have had a brief try and iTunes/Gracenote seems it does recognise a few more than the Core/SongKong but it is still struggling with some of my jazz collection. I bought the Core to:-
- have quality RIPs (not sure my Samsung drive/Mac) using XLD would be as good 2. to play through a Naim steamer into the hifi
- to copy the RIPs to an SD card to use in the car
- to copy the RIPs to a hard disc and play through a DAC in my second system or to play from the Core to the DAC in my second system
Having ripped everything to the Core and manually inserted the metadata when needed I thought I had got there but then discovered that copies from the core ended up with edited CDs being in the Unknown file. I have chosen to re-edit everything simply because I want to use the Core RIPs in the other environments. This is me being stubborn, I am well aware that my previous XLD RIPs are probably good enough. For me the biggest annoyance is not being able to see the edited metadata when you copy over the files - I really hope NAIM fix this. Clearly there are other issues with the Core (classical metadata), poor solutions for finding metadata (eg Gracenote being used) which could and should be fixed.
So, in conclusion, it is a case of ‘I wouldn’t start from there’ for me.
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