I have a Naim Unitiserve which I am planning to replace with a Naim Core in the near future. While the Unitiserve is in my network and interfaces well with my Superuniti, it is not backed up to my iMac or a NAS (tried a few years back but wasn’t tech-savvy enough and former dealer didn’t consider it as part of their technical support- current dealer is 500 km away).
Having read through Naim’s ‘Uniti Core Support’ guide, my question is:
If the Unitiserve and Core are both attached to my network, will the Core be able to read/detect the Unitiserve drive, enabling me to simply transfer the content of the Unitiserve to the Core through the ‘Manage Music’ and ‘Import Music’ settings of the Naim app? Or is it more complicated?
I just finished importing my music files from my NAS to the Core. I used a Unitiserve for a number of years and all the files I imported were ripped on the Serve. Since my Unitiserve was a SSD model, all my music was stored my my NAS. So my Unitiserve was not connected to the network when I did the import.
These are some things I found from the import process:
Even though all the music files were from Unitiserve rips, the Core did not recognize any of them as Naim rips and dumped all of them into the “Downloads” folder. I think a forum member had written that the Core will recognize Naim rips but it didn’t for me.
On a lot of my music ripped on the Serve, I had manually adjusted the metadata. I found out that the Core on the import ignored all of my manual changes and now just displays the metadata, it appears, based on what it found on the databases that it looks at, like FreeDB or Rovi. For example, on compilations, I had inserted the name of the artist on the song title. Now after the import it just displays the song title without my manual inserts.
On a few CDs, when it could not find any metadata, it now displays the album without any song title. Just the number of each of the tracks.
On a number of CDs with the same title (like Greatest Hits or Anthology) the various CDs with the same title are grouped under one of the artists. For example, the John Hiatt Anthology CDs were displayed under the Artist Stevie Wonder because I also had a CD by Stevie Wonder called “Anthology.” This happened with a number of CDs although there was a few that were displayed correctly under the correct artist.
I had a couple of CDs that ended up as “Unknown.” One of them was Santana’s Supernatural and both were ripped on the Unitiserve.
All of this is very frustrating as I am now slowly going through the App artist by artist to find out which ones are wrongly grouped or displayed and will have to rip them again. But even ripping on the Core does not guarantee that they will be grouped and displayed correctly. For example, I have 2 CDs with the title “Retrospective” and even though I ripped them on the Core and I can see that the music file is stored in the correct folder of the artist, both are still grouped and displayed under one of the 2 artists. This happened with another 2 CDs with the same title.
This is something very basic that one would expect Naim to get right but obviously not.
This is exactly the way it works. If the Core sees a Naim server as the origin of the files then they will be imported into the Music/MQ folder and you will be able to edit the metadata with the app.
If the Core isn’t certain that the files were originally ripped on a Naim server then it will put them into the downloads database. I don’t know how the judgement is made but I recall Naim saying it erred on the side of assuming they weren’t downloads if there was any uncertainty. If the rips do go into the downloads folder then the user edits will indeed be lost.
But if you still have the Unitiserve when you do the import, it should be fine.