Your music catalogue - offline access

Don’t you think it’s about time that Naim found a way to have your ripped music catalogue available off line?
It’s really a pain when you go to shop for CD’s and cannot remember if you already have an item in your system.
It would be really useful if the content that is shown in the Naim app was able to be “downloaded” or held in some way on your phone/pad so it can be reviewed when out and about.
Come on guys, find a way to provide this and add to one of the future software updates.

The Naim app is not able to do such things, it needs your home wireless hub to link to your Naim device.
However the concept is good & solutions are already available.
I can access my NAS via the interweb - although I have chosen not to do so.
I have all my NAS music catalogued on my PC & have used it on odd occasions when browsing the www.download vendors.

Mike, yes I get that. But I would have thought it would be possible for a button to be set up, so pressing would give a data dump that us held on the phone for offline checks. I accept this us a detail at a point in time, but could be pressed at any time to dump the updated details.
Having 10,000+ albums it’s a pain not being able to readily access the history details.
Not convinced that online access is the answer. Better to have a record file

I have about 1200 cd’s and got fed up of buying duplicates because I forgot I had an album already. God knows how you manage with 10k+ albums. I found an app called CLZ Music, which is a database of your collection. It recently went subscription, no idea of cost. Mine is a legacy account so free but no access to new features.

Basically, you just scan the barcode or type in the artist/title and it usually pops up with a lot of editable metadata. As with ripping, check the things that matter to you. It will take forever with your collection, only you can decide if it’s worth the effort to you.

Put it on all your devices and it synchs automatically. Accessible wherever you go, but uses up your some of data allowance. I gather all the albums I think I want, then quickly check them against my CLZ app and put back the ones I already have.

Agreed, it would be nice to pull up the same from the Naim app, but we can’t. Maybe one day. :thinking:

Yes Graeme, I used that clz some years ago but never really got on with it, so didn’t continue using it.
Thanks though.

If I had that many albums and couldn’t remember that half of them were, I’d be selling some, not buying more :open_mouth:

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Not a problem I’ve ever had, but I’ve “only” got about 1200 albums.

Surely this is nothing to do with the streamer manufacturer, though it could be applicable if you’re talking about the store (e.g. Uniti Core).

If your collection is on a NAS or computer, on a network connected to the internet, I am sure there is software that will allow you to view your collection from anywhere if you have internet access. For example, though I’ve never tried to set up online access, I’m pretty certain that VNC (free remote computer control software) that I use to manage my Mac Mini music collection from either a computer or a tablet or a smartphone can also be set up work across the internet (of course requiring me to configure my internet access point at home to allow it, with appropriate firewall etc).

Previously tried printing off a list of files and nearly used a team of paper!!
Hence the idea of having the equivalant of the Naim app showing files in an “off line” format

Offline, if not needed to be instantly updateable, how about screenshots from your file tree, held on a smartphone? However, I appreciate that with 10k albums that might only be manageable in practice if you knew you were going shopping for albums of a limited type, e.g. from particular artists.

If you have your collection in Discogs you can export it as a csv file that you can then import in to a spreadsheep app for easy searching. Getting a 10k album collection in to the Discogs database might be a PITA though.

So to be clear then one of the great advantages of streaming is this great searchable database which makes it easier to find your music or things you’ve not heard in an age but now the 1st world problem is accidental duplication because of a lack of offline access? LOL.

Buy CD
Add to VB based Excel Workbook CD list constructed about 19 years ago.

Access at any time via cloud on phone.

Who knew?!

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That and equivalents work whether someone has vinyl, CD or stored files. And the online solution I suggested lets one view a gold collection directly. But neither is what the OP wants, as IIUC he wants offline viewability

Looks like it’s exactly what he wants tbh.

No big issue, just a convenience.
As an example, was reading another thread over buying CD’s from poundland. Thought I would explore and called to a charity shop.
Bought 24 CD’s for 8 euro (3 for a euro).
Got them home and already had 3 of them.
No problem at these prices, but the principle still applies.
Not looking for 3rd party solution, but would be nice if Naim developed it as a bi product of the ripping software on the core

This was my thought as well. I’m getting my vinyl into Discogs, as its only about 100 lp’s. I don’t buy cd’s any more, other than some used ones online, and I’ve got my laptop in front of me when I do. So I don’t need offline access to anything other than my vinyl collection.

When I had a physical collection I catalogued, originally on paper, then in about 1986 on a computer database (can’t remember what it was - ran on an Atari ST), and in the mid 1990s an Access DB on a PC. Its main purpose was a record for insurance purposes, and of course Now I would be able to dump it into, say, Excel on my iPhone. However, I stopped maintaining it when I had, ripped all my vinyl and CDs., my backups of my collection being sufficient listing, and never having a need to have a list with me.

I would think that if the OP’s collection is on a computer readable store, and stored in a reasonable file structure (e.g. nested genre/artist/album, or somesuch), it should be possible to dump a copy of the file tree into, say, Excel and put that on a smartphone. But I haven’t had call to do anything like that for ages, and don’t know what current tools are available - maybe someone with knowledge of current general file handling software tools can help - as I said in my first post, I don’t see it as a function for the music playing ing or even library managing software, as in the Naim app., unless, perhaps, the music is stored on a Naim device like the Core.

Some statistics: if one was to read a list of albums at the rate of 1 per second it’d take best part of 3 hours to read through a list of 10k albums…

And it would take between 9 and 16 months playing 24 hours a day to play them all, or assuming 8 hours a day sleeping it would take between 13 months and 2 years to get through them all and hear them!

True, hence the need for something like the Naim app, so you can click on artist to pull up all the albums you have on that person before buying

The data is held on the music store, not the app or streamer, so surely it’s the server which has scanned your music files that you want access to?

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Exactly (& wot I sez in my 1st post)
Synology NAS have a package that allows you to have access to it over internet & to stream to a remote device.
I don’t use it myself but know others who do.