Hi all - just wondering if there is a solution to this - I’m moving an album (Clapton and Guests - Crossroads) which is a triple CD that I had years ago and have stored on my iCloud Drive but no longer have the CDs.
When I move them into my US downloads folder they appear on the Unitiserve app as dozens of separate albums (one for each song with each different artist that appears on the album).
This must be because the US recognises them as individual artists.
Is there any way to fix this and have the whole album (3CDs) store together?
Yes, it’s a bizarre shortcoming of the US that it’s incapable of handling compilation and multi-artist CDs in a usable way. The solution, as HH says, is to rewrite the metadata putting the artist in the track title field.
Another solution is to ditch the US and use Asset on a decent NAS… That gives full flexibility and sounds just as good. When I had a Serve I was hit with this very problem on a few albums.
Then you have the dilemma of whether to bin it, or get it repaired, which would be more cost effective as it then has a resale value.
Either way, hopefully you have the auto backup set up, and your files in FLAC to cover such eventualities.
That’s fine as long as you are aware that if your Unitiserve leaves the building, you will be stuck with metadata that most non-Naim servers cannot use. Convert it all to FLAC on the US and you won’t have that problem.
Also, you will almost certainly be unable to restore a repaired US from your backup in the way you can if you use the US automatic backup.
A quick solution is to create a playlist and drag all the tracks into that. I’ve done this with all compilations which my US sees as individual tracks.
This is what I’d do. Assuming that the WD is a my passport type unit, buy a decent Nas, a Synology or Qnap. Get the Serve to convert everything to flac. Back it up to the new nas. Set the Serve to transcode flac to WAV. Load Asset on the new nas. Stream from the nas instead of the Serve. Find out that the sound has improved. Get something to backup the nas to. Sell the Serve. Have full flexibility and be able to set album artist to one thing and artist to another. If you sell the Serve for more than the cost of the nas you’ll have a few quid for wine.
Or a few quid to compensate for the scam I was subjected to in March with the NAP500DR (that didn’t exist) and the thousands of pounds that ended up funding god knows what.
Which NAS do folk recommend these days? Nigel I saw your suggestions of Qnap or Synology but are there any models that are recommended as a replacement for the US?
I have a QNAP 253A. It’s relatively easy to set up, though @trickydickie did help me! The best thing is a socket on the front where you can plug in a portable hard drive, press a little button and it does a differential backup. It has two disks and supports hot swapping, so if one fails you just remove it and insert a new one.
I’m doing some research on these NAS drives. I note that the QNAP TS 253A retails at £600 and the QNAP TS 251+ is half that price.
Is the only difference between the two units the storage capacity or are there other considerations?
I have circa 1000 CDs to store and would like capacity for up to 2000.
Many thanks
The difference is probably due to the RAM. The 251 with 8GB is about £520. I think mine has 4GB which is fine for music.
You then need two hard drives. I use WD Red, which are optimised for a Nas, though there may be better out there these days. It’s worth getting at least 3TB drives as high res downloads are quite big and can chomp up the space.
If it helps, mine came from Broadband Buyer, who were well priced and efficient.
I prefer to stick with a single drive NAS. It’s cheaper and smaller, but mostly because, in the event of failure, I want other drives in a different enclosure, and in a different location. Actual HDD failure is only one of many things that can kill your music store.
That is true, and everyone should backup their nas to a separate disk stored elsewhere. The advantage of two, in Raid, is that if one fails you can simply insert a new one and it automatically copies from the other, thereby avoiding the need to restore from elsewhere. Either way works fine.