Those following my earlier thread will know that I got a Uniti Star recently. Keeping that choice to the side because of course I am satisfied with it, when streaming from Spotify, all the interesting stuff like the timeline and artist/song info eventually times out and I’m left with some boring album art (this lives on the CD rack if I want to see it).
Is there a way of keeping the interesting information on screen? It seems a shame to waste it with album art. When playing bluetooth there’s no album art but there is the ID3 information or other meta information shown.
This might seem fairly trivial but I like to listen to Spotify’s radio where it plays random songs. The only way I can see what these are on the 10 foot interface is to walk up to it so that it detects me looking at the screen and shows me the information. I might be getting old but my eyesight is still good enough to read the beautiful screen from the other side of the room!
It does seem such a waste that there is a beautiful, large screen and in the end it doesn’t do much most of the time!
Not quite sure why this ended up in streaming audio. Nothing to do with Streaming Audio. HMI is definitely a function of the hardware and its software.
The launch publicity for the new Unitis showed the useful screen but but Naim have turned a deaf ear to years of requests to implement it as an option. The useless for anything other than shows or dems proximity sensor will bring it up temporarily so throwing something at the screen may work.
The 1st gen. streamers allowed you to toggle through various different screen options. The screen itself was basic and couldn’t show artwork, but at least the implementation was good. Why Naim couldn’t be bothered to do something similar with the new screens I can’t imagine.
A lot of people I’ve noticed in pics online place, in their listening rooms, a big TV above or near their high end music systems. Personally I can’t think of anything more redundant. Having said that we have a MuSo2 for a soundbar. Go figure.
@pev999 I tried throwing a sock but it didn’t work. It seems so strange given that there is a dedicated button on the remote control for changing the brightness of four buttons which aren’t that useful and a name badge; I can guarantee that I will never use this button. However, it won’t tell me what track is playing! (Nor eject the disc easily!)
I’m looking for workarounds - I’m trying deleting all the artwork on the DLNA server as I think that has an impact. But I can’t do that for Spotify!
@ChrisSU - yes I originally got into this habit after the Uniti’s lovely little green screen told me all sorts. Dare I say, I think the original Uniti had a bit more energy too but I am an olive fan at heart. To be fair, the implementation on the LCD is great and I don’t think that needs developing further (navigation of functions is a pain because it just does so damn much!) - it just sad that it turns itself off after 20 seconds and shows me a mediocre picture of some artist’s self indulgance instead! I very much adore the evolution to the mini album art, neat, high resolution text and the time elapsed tell tale.
@carmoda - I’m not sure what your point is. What is redundant? The TV? The Uniti screen? The Uniti Star? I have a TV near my Uniti Star but I spent £130 on the TV and the better part of £4k on the CD player. Guess which one never gets turned on! I think the Uniti products are very much lifestyle devices. Not the sort of thing that you have to spend money on because… well you can’t take it with you. I’d expect to see them in kitchens and dining rooms.
Amusingly I also have a little box of LCDs from Farnell which I am trying to get to do interesting things.
I’m pretty sure, my former Atom and now Nova have a button on the remote control to display the details of the current song playing.
(My display is set to go dark after some short while.)
Yes, they do. I really don’t see what the issue is here. Unless you have opera glasses you can’t read the screen from across the room and it’s all there on the phone if for some reason you need to check what’s going on. Maybe it’s because I play whole albums that I feel no need for the track information.
When you are listening to Internet radio is when track information is important. Many streamers from other brands have larger screens and are readable from the sofa.
My internet radio is playing away right now. On my 17th trip to the screen to see what was playing (which is what prompted me to come look on here!).
I can read the screen from the other side of the room and ironically, it’s the phone I ignore.
I think with these lifestyle things the use case is different - I just stick the radio/streaming radio/playlists/playlists shared from friends (one of the reasons I use Spotify over the fancy audiophile ones) on when I’m doing something (playing computer games in this case).
Just as I type this, Return to Innocence by (I can’t tell you without walking over to the machine because all I can see is the Radio Parrotseyes logo) has just come on which I haven’t heard for over two decades. That’s the joy of radio/streaming services. Random, not album music that I don’t own.
@PhilippVH Yeah that button with the music note on, it displays it for a few seconds. However I would like it to be a bistable choice. That’s where I started, perhaps that wasn’t clear.
I don’t want people to feel I’m being argumentative but whilst in the olive era I told people “I really like track 5 on [album]” but never really knew the name(!) I feel like I cant even do that anymore yet we have so much metadata applied to each track. I can’t help being a young, power user of that. I still have so much music yet to discover.
Equally, to show how balanced I am - I don’t see the point of the massive volume knob as mine is hidden by being under a shelf. I can’t use it. But it’s there for some people. I just thought what I was asking about was something that would be there.
I see.
Yes, considering the built-in display is a very versatile piece of hardware with a lot of possible use cases programmable in software, Naim is not making the most of it. (Or even offers users a few settings to more flexibly choose from the available options.)
Haha. This is something some users have wanted (including me) since the beginning of Star. I also do not understand why Naim does not want us to give the option to see the detailed song info instead of large art. They introduced in the app the ability to switch the screen off so they could introduce the option to ‘freeze’ the display so it only displays the artist/song. I get the point that from a longer distance it may not be easily readable for everyone but for some it can be (I think such decision should be left for the user). Also, large art is sometimes distracting (bright). Such option (having text displayed) would be perfect when listening to internet radio and would save a lot of ‘phone time’ for example.
Well spotted. I’m sure I tried that but there are times when it doesn’t even detect that I’ve inserted a disc which is also unusual. I wonder if it works then…
If I can moan about this a bit more…even the design and proportions of the screens when not in full cover art mode is questionable. These pictures show it all. The biggest element on the screen is the one that is the least important - the pictogram/symbol – not sure what to call it. The second biggest element is the input name and this is not as important but still in quite large font. The most important thing such as: for the DAB input - the station name and the station info - for the currently played song - the song title, progress bar, time and stream quality are in the smallest font possible just to make sure it is unreadable from any distance (could the font BE any smaller?). Besides, half of the screen is empty. If the font selection were different i.e. the important information in a larger font and things like pictogram made small – the screen would be very useful and readable from sofa distance. I know this because I have a cd player and its screen is small but large enough to be easily read from 3 metres (Cd-text). Why this was not sorted – no idea but it makes me cringe each time – so easy to make it right and user friendly.
You would get much better quality from Radio 2 if you used FM or Internet radio and forgot about DAB, as you are in UK. Radio 2HD on iradio is 48 kHz 335kbps AAC, which is considerably better than DAB, although it’s true that the rather dire programming isn’t improved.
