Another issue related to yesterdays post of my new Uniti Core presently not recognising any CD’s. The handful of unidentified CD’s I ripped so far have had meta data added via the App. All appearing fine with assigned genre and artwork etc both on the core and my ND5 XS2 . However when I looked at the Music/ MQ folder (on my windows laptop) all of these albums are grouped under ‘unknown’ artist, and no meta data ie titles track list etc is shown. This doesn’t seem to right as presume that if I back up the Core and needed to restore, every CD which was not recognised in ripping would be restored without any metadata which I have created , and no clue as to which album is which .
Thoughts??
Doesn’t the core hold all the metadata inside json files and not in the wav files themselves?
Maybe, I just assumed that as meta data I added to downloaded albums using dbPoweramp is picked up by the core and added to the indexing, the reverse would be true. ie meta data added via the app would show up in windows file manager and artists/albums would appear in exactly the same way as ripped/identified CD’s.
Big limitation of the Core.
Metadata edits via naim app are not transportable, as you’ve found,
The data is held in JSON files alongside the album, rather than being stored in the audio files themselves.
Usual suggested solutions if you want to extract and embed the “naim” metadata into your actual files (making netadata available to all clients) are SongKong or custom scripting. Details via search.
Don’t forget that changing metadata won’t retroactively change file names, whatever server you use, so if it’s saved as unknown it will stay there. If the files are on a computer or nas the file names can of course be edited, but again it’s a separate process to any metadata edits.
What I’m trying to ascertain is, if I create a backup of the internal core hard SSD will all the meta data I added manually to non recognised CD,s be included in that backup (because reading the files in the MQ folder it’s not there )
And therefore if the SSD fails and I have to restore from backup, are all the user edits made to non recognised CD’s going to be there ?
If the data isn’t there, there is no point in having a back-up. I have an external SSD plugged into the back of my Core and I have assumed it is a simply copy of what is on the internal SSD and therefore would duplicate the contents in case of failure. If my assumption is incorrect then I am wasting my time, but I have no reason to suppose that is the case.
Why not rip to FLAC, the FLAC format embeds the metadata into the stream.
Because its enbeded it cannot be detached or lost
If you are ripping to WAV on a Core or other Naim ripper, the metadata is carried in a way unique to Naim. The WAV files has metadata carried as a separate file that can only play on a Naim player.
Naim players can also play the standard WAV format whic carries the metadata in chunks that are attached but not embeded in the stream
Not sure if this is relevant to this thread but I recently replaced my Core’s SSD with larger capacity one.
I simply plugged in my backup, telling it to copy to the new disk. It did this with no problems at all & all of my metadata edits & new album covers were included.
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Yes they will be there. But saved in a Naim-specific file alongside the music files, one for each album you have edited.
I haven’t had an SSD fail but on one occasion during Covid I used a restore from backup to move into a larger SSD and everything was fine.
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I’m cheers that’s encouraging 
Exactly what I found recently when doing exactly the same thing David.
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If I find after a ripping session that one or more files are missing cover art, etc. i fill in from the web the meta data before backing up and save.
The backup has always been an exact copy.
Now let’s say at some later time I wanted to change cover art, etc. on a file in the Music store (where the backup is presently identical). On any subsequent backup session would the changed material be changed on the backup as well using the Naim process? Probably would have to be done on a computer is my guess.
Surely the back-up software identifies any change in data and writes it into the back-up files? As far as the software is concerned there’s no actual difference between a change that is a complete new CD, or a cover, or album title. To take an analogy, if you edit a Word file on your computer and save it, the change will be implemented on the back-up next time it runs. With more sophisticated back-up software a history of back-ups will be stored but that wouldn’t be necessary with the Core.
Thanks for the explanation. Before I do my next backup, as a test, I may alter something inconsequential on an existing album and see if the backup picks it up.
BELIEVE HAVE GOT TO BOTTOM OF THIS
On delving down further into all the unknown artist folders contained in the MQ folder on the Uniti Core, I have noted that each unknown sub folder contains these files
meta.naim
rip.naim
userartwork.jpg
Therefore presume if a restore of backup is required these files will identify the albums once restored to the Uniti Core and used for the indexing. Will double check with support but sure this is the case
Well if the artwork is showing up the tracks should as well. I’m not sure that the ‘Unknown’ aspect is related or not. Should be interesting to see what Naim has to say.
On a Core, the metadata edits are not stored in the file (they’re written to the metadata file for each album). So useful for transferring album libraries between Cores, but less so if you’re looking for server portability. I found that this to be a wee challenge to work through when I pointed Roon at my Naim-ripped music library*.
What this means is that if an album isn’t identified at rip, it will remain in the “unknown” folder with a random album name. Manual metadata edits will ensure the correct information being shown in your streamer.
For my part, if an album isn’t identified correctly at rip, I copy the folder across to my computer, use my metadata editor (MP3tag in my case) to fix the metadata, and copy back to a Core-linked share on my NAS (your downloads folder could be used).
MP3tag allows me to do a bulk metadata to filename transformation as well, so the file names make sense when looked at in a file browser.
One last note is that Song Kong has a license option available that can interpret Naim’s metadata files when automatically fixing metadata, which might be a useful option for those looking to move their Naim library to a different server option
*it was mostly the WAV files that Roon wasn’t able to automatically identify. One of the annoying things about Roon is that if it doesn’t identify an album, it won’t always show the album in your library. It’s possible to fix this, but the process isn’t obvious. Or maybe I’m just not using Roon correctly.
That’s why I asked ‘Why not rip to FLAC’
FLAC format embeds the metadata into the stream.
Or is the answer simply that the Core cannot rip FLAC
You can choose FLAC or WAVE in the menu.