I’m getting a bit fed up with the sweepings of the cutting room floor tagged onto the back of a lot of CDs when I’m chaining a few together, I don’t need 3 different re-takes of a track I’ve only heard a few minutes ago before the next album starts.
I could separate them by deleting the main tracks of an album leaving just the bonus tracks, renaming the album by its title with “bonus” added on the end and then re-ripping the album, this time deleting the bonus tracks but it’s a bit of a faff.
Anyone know if there’s a way of editing the meta data to insert an “end” marker into the track list of a ripped album so that it will stop before the bonus tracks, and if in a chain move on to the next album? If the bonus tracks are wanted they can then be chained separately or as a separate group.
I suspect this facility isn’t currently available but who else would like it?
If there’s enough of us maybe this thread could be brought to the attention of the developers.
I think if they are on the album then that’s that, unless you permanently delete them. You can always remove them from the play queue by swiping left and deleting.
@Yeti: I do not have any album in my collection with “bonus tracks” but with MinimServer you could put the tracks that are not “bonus tracks” into a group and then only select and replay the tracks of that group, see “minimserver dot com slash ug-browsing dot html”, section “Groups and works”.
There are likely better ways to achieve the same goal but this is what first comes to my mind. I do not think that the Naim app plays any role in this context but it is likely that the UPnP server of the Core does not support grouping: it is a very basic server with little or no customization options.
But you could run MinimServer on any networked machine (for instance, on a small and incospicuous SBC) and set it to serve the Core’s data to your renderers. This would fix your problem and give you much more flexibility in the way you interact with your music collection.
Edit the metadata of the tracks you don’t want to include with something like MP3Tag to change the album titles to something like [album title]-BonusTracks and rescan, and they should appear as a different album.
If you’re using Minim, you could use the Group tag. Apply a Group tag of your choice, let’s say “XXX”, to all the main tracks but not the bonus tracks. Then, when you open the album in the Naim app it will give you XXX plus the bonus tracks. Just click again on XXX and all the non-bonus tracks will be there. This happens whilst still preserving the album intact. For this to work does require the tracks in XXX to be contiguous (it’s designed for playing the movements of, say, a symphony on an album with other tracks), but I suspect this will be the case anyway.
Incidentally, if you’re using Metadatics, this tagging can be done in a few seconds once you’re used to it.
All my rips are to WAV flies ripped on the Uniti Core with metadata in Naim’s linked database (if database isn’t being too generous). I’d like to see if other Uniti Core owners would welcome being able to separate out these extras, which are interesting to have but not to listen to each time the album is played, without deleting them altogether.
It could be done by making a playlist for each affected album I suppose, I don’t use playlists much so tend to forget about their existence.
In this case you are at the mercy of Naim proprietary database. This is a primitive, outdated and poorly supported software that was originally developed for the Uniti Serve. Perhaps Naim will someday provide a straightforward means of migrating the database to a standard non-proprietary format but I would not count on that. My suggestion would be to make you independent of the proprietary database as soon as you can and then start from there. Perhaps the Core supports migrating the music folder files to the downloads folder without losing metadata? This would give you a good starting point for adding group information to your albums. You could then try to have them served by a UPnP server that honors group tags. You could try this on one or two albums to see if it works well for you.
Because most bonus tracks are at the end of a CD I just stop playing the album at that point. Are we trying to make life more complicated than it needs to be?
I have a Kate Rusty cd and there’s an extra track that comes about 2 minutes after the last proper track. Caught me out first time thinking what the hell is this
If I wanted to do this with a standard server I think I would mark the main tracks as disk 1 and the bonus tracks as disk 2. Then you would have the option of selecting either.
Is this possible on the Core, it would be easy with conventional tagging software and Asset as a server.
As individual discs with disc 1 and disc 2 appended to the name if you’re lucky but if there’s a box set out too that includes those discs it often mistakes them for discs out of the set and you’re editing the metadata in the App.
That might be a viable workaround but a clean solution would be to partition the tracks into two groups while preserving the integrity of albums. This avoids the proliferation of albums which is a bugger because we already tend to have too many albums in our collections.
It is perhaps worth pointing out that the problem of partitioning the tracks of an album into groups is very, very common and one that every classical music collector necessarily faces: one wants to group tracks that belong to the same Work, Symphony, Suite or Act, together.
Many UPnP servers offer good support for grouping, the problem here is that the OP would like to use the Naim UPnP server which is an old, hardly customizable and not very well supported software.
I keep my finger crossed but I am afraid that the best we can hope is that, for a next-generation Core, Naim will come out with a competitive UPnP server and with a procedure for migrating legacy US and Core rips to the new software.
What if you want to add two or more albums that contain bonus tracks to the playlist? What if an album contains two or more symphonies (suites, acts, etc.) and you only want to play one of them?
Grouping tracks is a very elementary functionality that every halfway decent UPnP server should support.
There’s a difference between play list and play queue on the Naim App. I think building a play list for each group is probably the best option in the enviroment at the moment.
I was hoping there’d be lots of replies from people wanting to do the same thing as me to give some encouragement for Naim to address the issue, presumably between firware and App updates it would be possible, but it seem most Naim streamer users just don’t bother with the Naim server/software or those that do don’t read the Streaming Audio section of the forum.
Sound quality wise I’m very happy with the Naim environment, and particularly the way it lets the music move me (in both senses), a connection that is really working well since my latest cable and switch arrangment.
I think a major problem with changing the handling of metadata via a firmware update would be the backwards compatibility, especially if it meant converting existing metadata via some sort of translation programme.
The Core handles double CDs fine by the way.
But you can’t edit the title of a CD rip and hope that ripping it again won’t over-write the existing rip because the Core doesn’t use the album title as the identity indicator, but instead uses the CD number it reads from the CD. And you can’t edit that, at least not in the Naim world you can’t.
Best
