Last week I was in the process of converting the WAV files on my NS01 to FLAC . On the advice of @ChrisSU I did this one genre at a time. I worked through the full list of genres but left ‘Pop- Rock’ until last owing to its size. Since then the Met Office has been forecasting thunderstorms for our area, so the entire system has been switched off and unplugged.
Today I thought I’d switch it on and set the NS01 off to convert the final genre. The DTC showed that 6,977 files were identified for conversion. I switched to the Encoding Monitor screen to check that it was working and although the files were shown pending conversion, nothing further happened, i.e. no conversions started. I cancelled the operation and fired up the streamer and amplifiers to check that the server was working, which it is.
I have since tried to request just one album to convert, but again it doesn’t start the conversion process.
Does anyone have any thoughts regarding what might have happened and what I need to do to get it working again? Thank you.
I think I might have found the answer, because I’ve just noticed that the NS01 is running an internal backup, which it’s been doing since four o’clock this morning. I’ll wait until this has finished before trying again to convert any more files.
Good that you have a solution. Maybe worth leaving the thread up, it might be useful for anyone who thinks they can run a 1st gen. server without a bit of patience!
I expect I’m stating the bleedin’ obvious here: I assume you did some auditioning of WAV versus FLAC before you pulled the lever and kept a back up of your WAVs, just in case?
I made a comparison between the two plus the FLAC files converted back to WAV on the fly. It is easy to turn that off too. I had been wanting to do this for a while as my NS01 is now nine years old, but hadn’t had the courage to do so, for fear of it going wrong, but guidance from others on here made it relatively easy. At least I shall now have a degree of flexibility going forward. BTW I was surprised that Iain had no experience of the process.
It’s not a problem with the 1st gen Naim servers as they can convert FLAC to WAV on playback. If moving away from Naim, Asset and Minimserver can do it too.
Thanks, Chris, that’s reassuring. I will need some advice when it comes to setting all these things up.
The system is currently performing a differential backup (the final genre) to the external WD drive. This will be followed by a backup to the internal second drive and all should be good to go.
I’ve now switched transcoding off so that the ND555 is receiving native FLAC files. On balance I think this sounds best. When I made the initial comparison, I was using a few country tracks, this being the small genre I initially converted. With more bass heavy music it was sounding a bit bloated when the NS01 was transcoding on the fly. I also suspect the newer ND555 is probably more capable than the older server.
Hence, the setting in the DTC is now:
System & Functions/Naim UPnP Server/Miscellaneous Settings/Transcoding = Native
(I’ve written that here for my benefit as much as anyone else’s, so that I have a record of it.)
I think it sounds better when the server serves native FLAC to the ND555. I wonder if anyone else who’s done this with a 1st generation server and 2nd generation streamer would like to comment?
I still have my Unitiserve set to transcode to WAV, from when I had an NDX and thought it sounded very slightly better. Now using NDX2 into Chord Dave it all sounds much the same.