My twelve-year-old Uniserv is currently in the Naim service department, and I expect it will need the £500+ plus repair. Here’s my dilemma: -
Option 1 Get it repaired and make sure I backup of all the U/S music on to a NAS drive as no doubt the hard disk will fail one day. If I do that will the NAS show all the track listing details etc? Cost approx. £550- £600 for repair plus whatever a 2tb NAS costs
Option 2: not get it repaired, buy one of the last remaining Uniti Core servers and assuming my dealer can salvage the U/S hard drive and transfer music from the U/S over to the Core without any problems. Cost approx. £2.5k
Option 3: as the Uniti core is no longer made and Naim will eventually stop support for it, I’d prefer to buy either a current server model from an audio company (Melco, Innuos £2.5k+?) or a NAS drive (lower cost overall?). However, I’ve been informed that as Naim encode the music on their drives somewhat differently, if I do copy the music from the hard drive taken from the ‘dead’ Unitiserv, much of the track information for the CD albums (ripped in WAV) will be missing and I understand I’ll need to have a device or program that will extract the metadata from the Naim WAV files in order to see the information on the NAS. Or perhaps a specialist audio server will automatically do this?
Any advice on which option to take? Have any members copied music from a working Unitiserv to a NAS drive and managed to retain all the album information, changing WAV files to FLAC and how easy/difficult was it to do this?
Any thoughts or advice appreciated, plus of course any other options not considered above. Thanks, Dave.
I bought the Song Kong program, specifically for those who ripped their cd’s in wav on a Naim server. It creates a separate artwork file for each disc. Now I can see the metadata on my FiiO player used in my car. A search on this forum under Song Kong should give you more information.
You don’t have a backup?! If you keep the Unitiserve, set up the automatic backup to a NAS asap. It will preserve your files, edits and playlists intact.
Get the Unitiserve to convert your WAVs to FLAC and you will then be able to use the rips on other devices. It will take a while, but it’s very simple
Personally I wouldn’t buy a Core, but if you do it may be possible to have the files from the US saved and transferred to it without paying for a costly repair. Likewise if you use any other UPnP server.
Before my HDX died (similar to the thing you have) I set it to FLAC which converted all WAV rips to FLAC and preserved all Metadata which now shows on other players/streamers.
I already had back-ups to NAS drives, so when the HDX died, I simply used my NAS drives, installed with Asset server and to be honest, I don’t notice any difference in sound quality compared to my old HDX.
I do have a setting to convert FLAC to WAV on the NAS drive during playback, so my NDX2 is “seeing” WAV files.
Hi ChrisSU , yes I’m ashamed to say that “buy a NAS drive and backup” was on my to do list for the past year and sadly I put it off for just too long. If you own a NAS drive , is there any specific make you’d recommend? Thanks for the advice about not going for a Core either- hopefully I can convert the files on the U/S to FLAC as per your suggestion.
Synology or QNAP are the two tried and tested NAS brands that work well as music servers. I use a Synology, which has a free UPnP music servers bundled with it. This works fine, but more full featured servers that some prefer are Asset or Minimserver, which will both run on these NAS drives.
Don’t bother with a higher spec NAS, the entry level models from those brands are more than capable enough.
I have both a Synology (in the UK) and a QNAP (in Sydney), both are terrific and seem to be generally the “go to” brands used by Naim owners.
I have Assett server running on both. I find the Synology NAS is slightly easier to use, possibly because I use it more often.
I did also use Minim server but prefer Assett, both of which are better (IMHO) than the bundled server software.
Hopefully, your UnitiServe will return working with the files in tact. Then you’ll be able to make a backup as well. Song Kong may or may not be needed then unless you’d like to see the artwork in a car system for example.
Thanks Blythe, I’ll start perusing what’s available and at what price between QNAP and Synology. Assuming the U/S comes back from Naim fully working, I can then convert the WAVS to FLAC and it should be it’s relatively easy to copy the files across. I’ve got approx. 1.4TB of music from downloads and CDs on my Unitiserv so I’ll go for a NAS drive with 4TB storage to allow a bit of headroom for any extra music or perhaps other files (eg photos) in the future. Or is 4TB overkill and 2TB should suffice if I don’t add anything other than music? I personally don’t think there’s much more music I want to add, apart from the occasional new release, but that’s down to perhaps 2 or 3 albums a year these days .
Hi Chris, as per an earlier reply to Blythe, I hope this will be an easy-to-do process and I’m sure there’s some advice on how to convert WAV files to FLAC on the U/S elsewhere on this Forum.
I simply set my old HDX to rip as FLAC rather than WAV and the HDX slowly (it took a couple of days if I remember correctly) transposed the WAV to FLAC, writing temporary files as it went along until it had completed the task.
It only converted the files stored in the MQ folder, not the Downloads.
I might add that I did originally find that I preferred the sound of WAV over FLAC so I set Assett Server to convert FLAC to WAV on playback on my HDX.
However, I’m now using an NDX2 and I’m not sure they sound any different on that streamer.
Hi Dave, if you use a Mac, N-Serve will do the conversion for you. Control-click on an album, a genre, or your whole library, and select from the drop-down list. If you use Windows I’m pretty sure the DTC will do it.
If you prefer the sound of WAV, you can then set the US to convert FLAC back to WAV on playback. So you get the benefits of FLAC (portability to other devices, reduced file size) without losing the benefits of WAV for sound quality. I found WAV to sound a little better on 1st gen. streamers, but I was hard pushed to tell the difference on an NDX2, but the option if there if you want it.
In Windows it is easy to open the US, see files and, if required, copy these on a storage (a USB-stick in my case), All in wav, all sound great in my car.
If you keep the Unitiserve, set up the automatic backup to a NAS asap. It will preserve your files, edits and playlists intact.