The decompression process is a relatively trivial task. Still, if your streamer is doing it, there may be some noise generated by this additional workload, and that may well be why 1st gen. Naim streamer users tend to prefer WAV. However, many servers can carry out this workload remotely by converting FLAC to WAV ‘on the fly’ so that the streamer doesn’t have to do it. Asset, Minimserver, and the older Naim servers can do this. Roon also achieves much the same thing by converting any format to PCM in the Roon Core before sending to to the streamer.
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You can include the following parameters :
-0 --disable-fixed-subframes --disable-constant-subframes
Resulting in an uncompressed FLAC.
But I believe the decoding software will treat it as if it was only -0
I believe we can’t avoid to uncompress the file.
This is my understanding. However, if you feel that wav will laundry better you can always get your up phone server to transcode you flac files to wav on the fly. This works very well with Asset. If you use Roon then this transcodes to its proprietary pcm container, RAAT. This also works extremely well.
It depends what you use, HDD or SSD: whilst memory is coming down and SSDs are now a bit under half the price I paid when I installed a pair of 1TB 5 years ago these chips are still not quite as cheap as the potato ones where I live…
Aside from whether people want to spend extra money on storage capacity, there is also backing up to consider, double the filesize doubling the time to do backups - and backup capacity also needing to be doubled. Some of us use two or more backups, another to factor in.
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FLAC…in this specific case, because my dealer said it is better.
Yes is a function of dBpoweramp (dBp is the short ID)
I don’t have Mac, I’m Windows-10, so I’ll run through that & you’ll have to join the dots or someone on the forum who knows how will tell you.
Open the Mac eq of File Explorer on the album file to be checked & select a track.
A popup window appears
See screenshot pic sequence
Open the popup line Edit ID Tags
A new screen appears showing the metadata for that track
The album art is shown in the bottom left corner.
Out of interest, why poweramp over Media on Win 10?
It doesn’t have the ability to edit metadata.
Also I only advised to use dBp as I knew pslosarc had it, my normal go to metadata tool is Mp3Tag
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Thanks Mike, I have learnt something today. Yes I can see the artwork using the Mac file editor. It is there for all the Flac files but not for the Wav files, yet I used the same settings for ripping both so not sure how I could rip with dBpoweramp to Wav and retain the artwork for that format (or even if its possible)?
I ripped to WAV with dBp for years, never had any art problems. Also frequently flipped to FLAC when ripping for others, & never needed to change anything wrt art settings.
I would try a re-rip on a problem album have a recheck with your settings.
Better than that, I’ve discovered that I can (block) edit and insert album artwork into Wav files (i.e. all Bruce Springsteen songs), but it doesn’t appear on the Nova screen unfortunately, although Flac art does appear so presumably there is some other factor at play here relating to Flac v Wav embedded artwork?..maybe thats a query for Naim Support relating to the Nova?
The zip example on the page is a good one but maybe could use some elaboration for the less technical people:
Think how you use zip to compress and uncompress a document. The resulting document is indistinguishable from the original in every respect because it is the exact same zeros and ones. The compression is achieved by many neat mathematical tricks, but a simple example is this: If the document contains the word “test” for a thousand times in succession, an uncompressed file would contain “test” a thousand times. Lossless compression would turn this into the information “1000 times ‘test’”, which is obviously less data to store, but the same actual information.
If only the latest Naim servers would let you save to flac and transcode to WAV you could have the best of both worlds. The UnitiServe and HDX could do it, but the Core and the Star cannot. Some might consider that progress.
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A Roon Server is probably the most elegant solution.
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It may be, but that’s a different issue. It’s odd that Naim have reduced functionality. For what it’s worth, Asset on my Qnap does it admirably. I certainly wouldn’t buy a Naim server or rip with a Star, given all the shortcomings in basic functionality.
Couldn’t agree more, Nigel, having recently had my ageing HDX convert everything to FLAC, then transcode back to WAV for replay.
It makes no real sense that his facility isn’t present in the present range of rippers / servers.
A backward step, I’d have thought.
But only for people who like Roon, and by no means all do!
The elegant solution is for the streamer/renderer to not be affected by file codec type, whether that be by having enough processing power or whatever. Are the latest Naim ‘separates’ streamers sensitive to whether it is .wav or .flac?
I can’t answer your point about the sensitivity or otherwise of the current streamers, but all Naim’s literature refers to ripping in WAV, as “it sounds better”.
It does seem odd, therefore, that only the older ripper / servers offer transcoding on the fly.
Hi @Shirazsun,
I purchase/download my digital music always in WAV format from either Bandcamp.com or Qobuz Store; dominant genres are Jazz, World and Pop, not (yet) classical.
Based on ca. 60 and 10 albums downloaded from resp. Bandcamp and Qobuz the following holds (without exceptions):
- WAV files from Bandcamp are not tagged
- WAV files from Qobuz are tagged (both ID3v2.3 and RIFF INFO chunk)
I tag WAV files from Bandcamp (ID3v2.3 only) and, if needed, correct tags in WAV files from Qobuz with Kid3 - Audio Tagger (https://kid3.kde.org/), which is free/libre software, available for a.o. the following platforms: Windows, Mac and GNU/Linux.
Still struggling with my classical CD’s… I am not happy (understatement) with metadata for classical music as offered by my Unity Core. The meta.naim file (JSON format) generated during CD ripping contains much more info (automatically gathered from Rovi, FreeDB and MusicBrainz services) than presented in the Naim app.
Recently I started a programming exercise in Python 3. The script will scrape relevant data from the meta.naim file (incl. composer and conductor) and write the relevant fields in the ID3v2.3 tag of the WAV files. This is work in progress…
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