Hi, has anyone used their Uniti Star’s facility to rip CDs onto memory cards? Is it easy and what is the SQ of the playback of those rips, is metadata also copied onto the cards? It would be great to clear shelf space used by the CDs.
I’ve got a very early Uniti 1 and instead of paying for a service, thinking of changing it to a Star. I only will use it for CD/ripped CD playback, radio and streaming to feed into my 282/250DR.
Thanks
Best wishes Amer
The Star has a somewhat basic handling of metadata which will be fine for many users, but limited in its ability to handle classical music in particular. Other than that, it could be a great one box solution to rip CDs and play them from storage.
I’m not sure about memory cards, but you can use a USB HDD or SSD, and if it’s connected to the rear USB port, it can be easily hidden out of view.
An alternative would be to rip CDs on a computer, then you can still save them to a USB drive attached to the streamer if you prefer not to use a NAS. This would work with an Atom or a Nova as well.
I owned a Star for a while and ripped a few hundred cds to a Seagate back up plus sim 1 tb.
The replay sound through the Star via PMC dB 1s I thought marginally better with the ripped version.
The Meta data is lacking for many cds not issued by the majors,but I identified the cd by putting a cd cover photo in to my photos and then inserting it into the Metadata. I then thought in the future if I forgot the required information I could easily find it via Google.
So a worthwhile if time consuming pursuit.
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Thanks Chris and Nick, I was hoping to not increase the the number of boxes I use by only using the Star and using its facility to rip onto a Sim card and I’m assuming playing them back via that Sim card on the Star. Space is tight in my set up.
From what you’ve said Nick, it seems I could do that just with the Star without additional boxes. Good idea of how to compensate for CDs that don’t have Metadata on them.
Chris, I don’t have space for a separate streamer so was intending to use the Star for streaming because of that. Your idea of using my iMac to rip CD’s onto a USB drive is a good one, but I would assume it wouldn’t sound as good as using a Naim CD drive and electronics to do that. So your idea about using a USB HDD or SSD is a good one and worth trying and seeing if that is better than using the sim card route.
Thanks again
Best wishes Amer
I have a Star and I’ve done exactly what you have suggested, ripping CDs directly to the SD card. I use the FLAC option for embedded metadata. Works well for me.
If you run an app such as DBpoweramp on your computer, you will get rips that are as good as those you would get on the Star. You will also get a much more versatile way to handle metadata.
Given the quality of your amp, you would then be able to use a better streaming source than the Star, which would have a redundant amp in it. An ND5XS2 should give you better sound quality for less money than the Star, or if you want to give your 282/250 the quality of source that it really deserves, save a bit more cash and get an NDX2.
As per maccaboy10, I put 512Gb SD card in my Star and I’ve had no issues at all. Seems to work well.
Agreed. Given the quality of the OP’s amp, having a redundant amp in the Star makes no sense. A ND5XS2 and dbPoweramp rips on either a NAS or hard drive plugged in to the back of it makes far more sense and will also be cheaper.
Thanks for these new ideas, it’ll take a while for them to sink in, I’ve got loads of CD’s and not enough space to have a NDX and CD player running at the same time. I take it I would then get the radio off the internet via ND5XS2 or NDX2?
The Star idea was an easy way to gradually free up shelf space by putting my CD’s onto memory cards at my own pace. The sound I’m getting from my current system makes me very happy especially since I changed from Naim Snaic’s to Witch Hat Morgana interconnects.
Thanks for all these comments, the Forum community always delivers!
Best wishes Amer
You would used internet radio on a Naim streamer. It may not sound as good as a well set up FM radio with a decent aerial, but the uncompressed FLAC streams that the current streamers support can sound very good.
If space is limited, all the streamers can take either hard drives or USB memory sticks in either of their USB ports. However, the whole point of these network streamers is that they can find and play music files from any location on your network, so a NAS does not need to be located anywhere near your hifi rack. It just needs an Ethernet cable connecting it to your router.
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