Naim Rips are GREAT! now how can I take them with me and play them?

Oh c'mon - stick a crowbar in your wallet and pry out enough cash to get the Bentley and be done with it!

Naim rips are lossless .wav files, and as such may be larger than you want for use on a portable device.  While I would not want to listen to anything other than lossless on my hi fi, I am happy to listen to high bitrate lossy files on my portable device while running, on the airplane, or in my car.  

This leads to me having two rather large music libraries -- my lossless library for home listening, and a totally independent iTunes library (the origins of which long predates the home hi fi) for my IPods and iPhones.

Truly elegant integration of the two would be of interest. (Of course it could only work one-way, as there is no way to convert lossy files to lossless )  And since the Apple devices need iTunes, that just may not happen.  'TIl then, I just have two music libraries.  There is a lot of duplication.

Next version of server software is scheduled to have parallel encoding of a compressed version of rips for use with an MP3 player incorporated...

Phil

This has been discussed before and it is a long-due feature from Naim IMO.

Naim rips are WAV without any tagging whatsoever (as far as I know) as the metadata lies elsewhere in the form of XML files notably. You could transcode the WAV files to any format suitable to you, but you would have to retag all of them...

A way for the servers to transcode the files to other formats is a feature that has been envisioned by Naim for a while now, and Phil hinted it might come this year, if ever.

In the meantime -- and this has been reported here to be working -- you could use MediaMonkey (on Windows) to transcode and add tags based on the folders structure, thus giving you the very basic Artist and Album tags. Not that convenient but better than nothing.

HTH

Maurice

EDIT: Ooops... Sorry Phil, cross posts. Please tell me it will be able to transcode to FLAC, pleeeze !

related, but  noddier question: i have all my .wav music as folders on a separate portable USB hard drive, (i.e separate from my NAS drive).

question is can i plug this hard drive directly into my nDAC using the USB input and play the music there?

enjoy

ken

No - the Naim DAC (I have to try to stop you guys using "nDAC" as it drives our marketing dept. nuts) has no way of navigating the folder structures.

Cheers

Phil

Oooooooh - now that's interesting Phil! Will there be a choice of compressed formats? Will it be possible to transcode the existing rips? And, out of interest, will Naim ever consider tagging the WAV files themselves? it would be nice to have the Naim solution for the main zones, but to use alternative solutions such as Sonos or Logitech in other zones, without having to resort to transcoding the WAVs to FLAC, for example.

Regards,
Frank.
All opinions are my own and do not reflect the opinion of any organisations I work for, except where this is stated explicitly.

in my company, 'marketing' purpose seems to be to stop us having fun. not sure where i got the nDAC acronym from though.

thanks for clarification, so i guess i have to 'reveal' the actual .wav files for them to play on the Naim DAC? (you see i am learning already...)

enjoy

ken

Ha ! THANK YOU for that Frank, I was feeling very lonely regarding this subject.

ATB

Maurice

PS: In passing, I always enjoy reading your very knowledgeable posts, thanks for that too.

Yes ken, but also I think Naim don't officially support USB hard drives, only USB keys (up to ~32 GB I once read here from a Naim engineer, if I remember well). The larger USB drives can draw too much current from the USB socket, and separately power them would probably cause earth loops or other electrical problems detrimental to the sound quality. And I think the nDAC navigation interface is quite rudimentary and would be cumbersome if you have many files...

HTH

Maurice

Well... if you used a different server it could transcode on the fly and send music out to your iOS device (or other upnp renderer) anywhere in the world.

Just a thought.  Make your own cloud.

-Patrick

very useful additional info Maurice, many thanks...

enjoy

ken

Welcome. I wanted to add links but I couldn't find the specific posts. Better wait for Phil to chime in again just to be sure, but as I understand it, the USB sockets on the new Naim boxes are here only for convenience and were never really intended as the main way to play music files, though a few people seem to use them like that.

Are these 250s finally singing ?

Some NAS drives are accessible remotely if you have an internet connection.  I have a Buffalo Terastation.  Buffalo produce a free app for Ipod, Ipad and Iphone which allows me to listen to the uncompressed wav files on my NAS, wherever I happen to be in the world.  Obviously it depends on the quality of the internet connection and, being Apple-based, wav files are fine (incl. hi res) but flac files are not recognised. 

No good for the car.  I wonder why no-one produces something like those CD changers you used to see?  Instead of CDs you'd have a removable drive to which you could backup or replicate your music files, then slot-it-in and it would run off the car battery and feed the on-board system.  Maybe this already exists and I haven't yet seen it.  

If I remember correctly a company called "Dension" used to do one for in car use ...

... or there was the "EMPEG" (which I had one of and never used it) but that had two fixed 2.5" drives rather than removable ones.

Phil

I work the way Bart does: use iTunes to sometimes import from my main - lossless library and have it create 320kbps mp3's on the fly. I put the mp3's on a stick and load them into the hifi in the car

i have often wondered how i can access my ripped files while away on business -- and i was beginning to think Oh, a USD hard drive, plus some nSats, plus perhaps Supernait might do it, but not so far...

Yes, the 250's are singing, thanks Maurice -- very good indeed with the snaxoDR uplift, but they are not 300's, and my daughter described convincingly, in what obvious ways the bigger amps are better...

enjoy

ken

Phil, isn't that what dbpoweramp does. I used that when ripping to my pc . I did simultaneous rips to flac, WAV  and aac. It will be good to see a Naim bit perfect version. 

When is the next version due.

You can rip from a CD to a number of formats simultaneously using dBpoweramp - I have tried ripping to FLAC and mp3 and it worked fine. You can also convert formats post-rip using the Music Converter, or for larger conversions, the Batch Converter utilities that come with dBpoweramp.

My car (BMW) will play music from a USB stick.  The basic tag info (artist, title, etc) and album art all show up on my dash!

I'm learning rapidly the joy of coming up with a sincere good question... And the gems that come out of it....   The new release for example....

Can you buy a naim car deck without the Bentley?

I also did find a device which the iPhon into plugs into which is a dac and power supply.... More on it later.

Bart, yep if like my BM it works well. What is really neat is the CDripper inbuilt into the car NAS. Play a CD it rips it as well if you want whilst it plays it and stores it on the car hard drive deriving the meta data from CD text. You can the search and index on the meta data. It really works well.

Hi,

No - you can't buy a Naim car deck without the Bentley. The Bentley head unit is so tightly integrated in with all the other electronics that that sort of thing is just not possible. Gone are the days of just swapping out a head unit in a DIN or Double-DIN housing.

Anyway - it's not just the head unit and in fact most of the "Naimness" is external to the head unit. There's our custom designed amplifier (15 channels of 100w RMS IIRC) which also does lots of very useful (for in car use) DSP goodness and also I believe that most (if not all) the standard fit speakers are replaced with modified / custom designed units.

As a rather insignificant looking tickbox on the options list it's actually quite far-reaching into the baseline build of the vehicle.

Cheers

Phil

dbpoweramp is capable of doing a multiple format rip ... We will be working slightly differently in that the rip will still be in a lossless format (WAV) and then there will be a separate (optional) encoding pass that will encode to a compressed format (CBR MP3) for use with portable devices...

 When we have it fully tested.

Cheers

Phil

I have previously used a combination of dbpoweramp to batch re-encode my entire library into MP3 format and add the coverart to the tag - then, as I couldn't work out how to get dbpoweramp to add the track number, track title, album name and artist name fields itself, I use "The Godfather" (rather an old and now not-so-good tag editor) to add the track number, track title, album name and artist name to the tags from the folder structure after the MP3s have been generated...

...I just now wish that Apple did a 2Tb iPod Classic.

Phil