Quality issue

If you leave genres uneditied and try to use the ones you get from CD rips and downloads, you inevitably end up with a dog’s dinner. You need to work out a scheme that suits you and then stick to it.
I find that there is no prefect answer. As you say, there is a lot of overlap, so whatever you do will be a compromise. You can always try Roon, which is a powerful solution that works well for some, and not so well for others.

I try to avoid the inevitable mess from rips and downloads by tweaking the genre settings before the files are copied to the NAS. Since I only saw the haphazard results of automatically ripping well after I started on my CD collection, there is still a lot to clean up.

A pleasant side effect is that I keep rediscovering forgotten gems.

My biggest problem is trying to be consistent with metadata for classical music.

I trialled Roon last year, but did not really get on with it. I might try it again after I have purged the genre information of my existing collection.

The first is Ambient / Electronica and the second is ECM New Series. There are as you say decisions to make such as whether Gillian Welch is folk or country, but if you know you want a certain artist then the artist search does that. The Pop/ Rock is a catch all for everything else, from Joni Mitchell to Deep Purple, Simon and Garfunkel to The Smiths. It works for me, and that’s all that matters.

And even if you go with a reduced number of genres like HH, you can put more than one against a particular album - it’ll just show up in more than one place.

Really? How do you do that - both under genre with a comma between, or a space? That could be really useful and would sort my Gillian Welch challenge.

Semi-colon, I think - I’l have to check. That certainly works for artists.

Rock; Pop ought to show something under both.

Thanks, I’ll have a fiddle later. I imagine I’ll have to enter manually as the drop down would presumably overwrite.

Been a Naim user for over quarter of a century, one item needed repairing - that’s all.

I accept that software is a thorny issue, but I’ve seen the Yamaha site talking about their difficulties. I am approaching streaming as the sheer volume of cd, lp, blu-ray & dvd start to gang up.

Most likely will get a Mac Mini and use it via a USB dac , have a great desire to follow the rule of KISS (keep it simple ******)

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“Been a Naim user for over quarter of a century, one item needed repairing - that’s all.”

Sweet :+1:

“I accept that software is a thorny issue, “

for me the APP although basic is enough: I only use play/stop/fwd/rwd and change input

“I am approaching streaming as the sheer volume of cd, lp, blu-ray & dvd start to gang up.”

That’s one of the main reasons why I changed. The minimalist approach. Less … “junk” to clean, although e do miss the tactile experience/ ritual

“Most likely will get a Mac Mini and use it via a USB dac , have a great desire to follow the rule of KISS (keep it simple ******)”

There’s a lot of ways to get it done. :+1:

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I have a smallish collection of music on disk, but a big (2700) collection of favourites on Qobuz. My expectation is for the app that I use to help me manage my music collection over these defiirent media, while allowing me to perform best possible playback. And the Naim app on Android falls quite short.

It feels more like a app to control my NDX2. An that is a far cry from music collection management.

One of the user stories that really annoyes me: scroll through (very long) list of Qobuz
releases (which you can only see in the sequence they were added, and cannot filter in any way), click on one of the releases to check if it contains the song I am looking for, it does not (it’s on the next release), so go back to the list, and that list is back at the top.

Why not use Naim preferences? Because that list does not contain all my Qobuz releases.

Hope this explains why I find the Naim app lacking in simple usability.

Kr

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Why not just get Roon?

I was thinking that.

The Naim app is perfectly adequate for playing your own music or music from the supported streaming services.

It is not music management software unlike Roon.

I think it’s nice that the new streamers have both options. It’s a bit trickier with the older ones, but still doable to add Roon to the legacy models with a bridge .

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Playing, yes. Searching and finding something (except an album title or artist name) in your own store of thousands of albums, less so. One might argue that this is all it needs to do. Maybe, but it made me defect to Roon as the library had simply become unmanageable.

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But that’s where good and consistent metadata comes in, at least if you rip or download to something like a NAS and edit the metadata carefully.

Roger

Unfortunately, the file tags are hugely limited. Apparently thought up by nerds with limited music diversity. E.g., how do you add every contributor from the album’s credits list? That’s why Roon uses a separate database.

Tag availability aside, it would be way too much work to do apart from the greatest favorites. That’s where Roon’s metadata service comes in. It’s not perfect, but pretty good even for more obscure releases. I only had to enter the metadata for obscure German and Austrian artists that happen to be among my favorites. Still a lot of work but manageable. (The connections that Roon uncovers once the metadata is in place is astounding)

What are you referring to here? If you are talking about format meta data, as opposed to file tags(?) , then for formats like WAV these were created by the creative audio industry… so perhaps creative music nerds yes, but very close to the audio authoring business. One observation is that, for WAV, they were created for audio file creation industry, rather consumers ripping CD albums.
The latter was addressed with ID3 meta data ranges which was developed by Eric Kemp in the mid 90s and evolved by the early ripping and streaming user community for MP3 files… so yes a very diverse group of people that in some way paved the way for much we use now use in consumer streaming.

But either way, these attributes are nothing to do with file tags or attributes… they are media encoding attributes… stored within the encoding format.

For reference the id3v2 frame specifications are here, and I think most would agree it’s a wide range of attributes.

In this context I don’t care about how the metadata storage is implemented and it seems that I missed a lot of developments in this area after my initial disappointments decades ago when mp3 was new and there was e.g. only one date tag, when I needed at least three (performance/recording date of songs, original release date of songs and album, issue release date).

Nowadays the technical facilities might be in idv3, but if so you still need a way to populate them. The usual tag datebases like musicbrainz etc. that are queried by dbPoweramp only provide one date. In the streaming services, who could do what they want, dates are also patchy and inconsistent, so sorting by date in Tidal etc. tends to sort 60ies artists into later decades because this was the reissue date.

Not to even speak of listing every group member, guest musician, engineer, etc., from an album’s credits in a cross-linked way. This info is usually there in Discogs, but apparently not queried or tagged. Doing it manually is out of the question, i.e., I disagree with PeakMan’s “at least if you rip or download to something like a NAS and edit the metadata carefully.” for practical reasons. I guess the Naim servers like Core might get some of this info from Rovi? Don’t know, never used one. But using manual CD rips, dbPoweramp, a UPnP server and/or streaming service, and a Naim streamer + app, it’s not doable.

Anyways, my point was simply that Roon has the technical facilities and the actual data to put into use.

You could say there is also a real downside to using a proprietary database by a specific vendor like Roon, because it means you are stuck with it if you want to keep access to your data. You lose most of the portability.

ID3v2 tags are universal and extensible, and most of the databases to sync/fill them with are open source and/or free use.

A program like MP3Tag (https://www.mp3tag.de/en/) can use multiple online databases, including Discogs, to populate tags. Another option is TagScanner (https://www.xdlab.ru/en/).

Those options are perhaps not as convenient as Roon though, since they require some manual work. But it will give you a portable tagged collection that you can use with any local or UPNP music player. And perhaps a more complete set of data than Roon as a single provider could ultimately provide.

https://api.discogs.com/releases/249504

Even the old Naim rippers, often criticised by some for their limited functionality, are able to show a fair amount of metadata where it’s available. The server or streamer doesn’t always make it available, or may show sn alternative source such as a Rovi booklet, but that doesn’t mean the info isn’t there.
Here’s a random example of an album ripped from CD on a Unitiserve:

When I think of tags, I think of Roon tags that I can easily add my own and are separate from Metadata.

I browse through new albums and ones I’m interested in I add to library but also add a, “Check out New Albums” tag. They then sit in this sub list until I’ve listened to them and I either delete them from the library if I don’t like them or, add them to a them to another tag that I’ve made specific for that genre if I like them and then remove them from the, “Check out New Albums” tag.

I use genre lists in Qobuz etc just as a way to look for new stuff to add to my library while Roon Tags are used to manage my favourite albums within my library with names and genre types that are relevant to me.