Naim Core metadata question

Good morning, and Happy New Year to everyone here.

I recently set up a second Naim system in my vacation getaway. At home I have a Naim streaming system consisting of an ND555 (love it…) and a Uniti Core, upon which I have ripped tons of CDs … and edited metadata, which consists mostly of adding cover art where it was missing.

For the vacation retreat, I cloned my home NAS drive with all the ripped CDs and assorted downloads from the home system. I’m using MinimServe on the cloned NAS and a Uniti Nova to play music.

All of the metadata that I edited in the downloaded files renders perfectly on the Nova and Naim app. However on the CDs that were ripped in the Naim Core, NONE of the metadata edits show up in MinimServe. Are there other UPNP servers that would be more compatible with the Core edits?

I have been reluctant to go into Music folder of Naim Store to change anything, for fear of breaking something in that structure.

Hoping this all makes sense. Would greatly appreciate any input any of you could offer.

Best…

The way that metadata is handled by the naim core is proprietary and cannot be used by another upnp application. It exists in separate files in json format.

Stick the file on a USB drive and put that in the Nova. It has a built in Naim server that should be able to handle Naim metadata.

Thanks @ChrisSU. Unfortunately I have literally hundreds of albums ripped by a Core that have metadata issues. I was looking for a broader solution that might be applied to all of them, but as @robert_h mentions above, that appears to be impossible given the proprietary fashion that the Core operates.

I understand that at the dawn of Naim streaming they decided to store the metadata separately of the files because a) The streamers of that era sounded better with WAV and b) the files sounded better if the metadata was separate

For your vacation location, you might need you use something like song Kong, which is able to read the Naim metadata file and embed it into the music file (which will then be readable by minim)

I’ve found many of the same problems you have when I attached my Roon Core to the Uniti Core music stores - the Uniti Core didn’t even rename files or put albums into the correct folder if they are misidentified and fixed manually, and Roon will subsequently need manual editing to fix them. Very frustrating

Thank you! I’ll check out SongKong. Had not heard of it until now.

Do you mean that the metadata is missing, or just that it can’t be seen on non-Naim servers?

No metadata is missing. It all works fine on the Uniti Core server. It’s just that it is invisible to MinimServe (and I assume other non-Naim servers).

I find a similar problem when I use my BlueSound Node 3 to stream from my Core. The files in the Downloads folder on the Core stream with no issues, including all cover art, but the albums that are on the Core as ripped from CDs are present (in the Music folder), but are missing cover art. The BlueSound seems to attempt to discover the cover art itself. Sometimes it succeeds and sometimes it just leaves a blank album cover. The album titles are still there however, and all the tracks (as far as I can tell) are still playable.

A bit frustrating! There doesn’t seem to be any general solution.

See below. Perhaps Naims software allow the -uncompressed switch (-level 0) to FLAC so you can avoid compressing the wav-files (the music data will still be in a Flac-container though).

Any Naim Uniti customer that needs to transfer their ripped files to other systems had to make a decision between Uncompressed Wav without portable metadata or converting to Compressed Flac . This allowed metadata to be stored but at the possible expense of sound quality since the Flac files are compressed.

The older Naim servers gave you the option to convert your Naim rips to FLAC, which would have solved this problem for you, but this function is missing from the Core, so you are stuck with what you’ve got unless you re-rip your entire CD collection from scratch and save them as FLAC, which I’m sure you won’t want to do!
Using one of the many converters out there would transcode your WAVs to FLAC, but they would not incorporate the metadata into the FLAC file. I believe SongKong is an exception to this, so I think the suggestion to use this to convert your second library is a good option.

For any future CD rips, you could set your Core to rip to FLAC to avoid this issue. Otherwise you’ll need to keep using SongKong to convert copies of the new rips.

I compared WAV and FLAC before converting all the albums on my NS01. Although it might have been true with earlier streamers (e.g. NDS) that WAV sounded better than FLAC, I did not find this to be true with the ND555. Having made the conversion (which took a long time!) I then tried transcoding back to WAV on the fly, but found that the ND555 sounds better when fed with FLAC, without transcoding.

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When I first started using the Uniti Core, about 4 years ago, I was ripping into FLAC. Then after reading some posts in the forum, which suggested that WAV rips produced better sound, I switched to WAV. But try as I might, I could discern no difference through the ND555. I’ve since gone back to FLAC, mostly for the metadata editing options. And still I can’t hear a difference.

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