NaimUniti: does firmware update address Upnp Gapless issue?

I'm afraid not. Firmware v2.0 does not address this problem.
Naim HQ are aware of this issue, but no solution has been provided yet.
recent forum post about Uniti software updates

It's ridiculous. NaimUniti isn't cheap budget device. If it cannot play files without gaps - it's not worth a penny for me.
I would be very upset if I'll purchase NaimUniti & discover it makes gaps between tracks of my favourite albums. Thank's God we still have Linn DS!

Thank God we still have HDX / UnitiServe et al, all of which have gapless playback via their local outputs.

Gapless playback is not part of the UPnP AV specification for media renderers, though it can be implemented. Naim is listening, however.

I used to think the lack of gapless playback was a show-stopping issue, but I've changed my mind, because I've realised how to achieve it.

It is only some of your cds that need gapless playback - for me mostly opera and choral pieces, for others it might be live rock concerts.

For these works it is easy to make one long track out of the individual tracks, and this will play gaplessly perfectly. I would use foobar - select the tracks, right click, Convert, think of a name, and its done. For example, I would make each act of an Opera a track. Done wisely, this concatenation gives a better result than cds, which often have cd breaks at annoying places in a large piece. Gaps between acts are not an issue - you get 30 minutes at Covent Garden!

I think this is quite a reasonable work round until such time as Naim, like Linn, get gapless playback working.

You may call me crazy but I´m using a Squeezebox Touch connected to a digital input to play iRadio stations, like Avro Classics HD. that plays with LOTS of gaps with the Uniti. Also, the new iPad app, SqueezePad is FANTASTIC!!! Wish NAIM take a look at this app and try to make something like it...

quote:

Originally posted by likesmusic:
I used to think the lack of gapless playback was a show-stopping issue, but I've changed my mind, because I've realised how to achieve it.

It is only some of your cds that need gapless playback - for me mostly opera and choral pieces, for others it might be live rock concerts.

For these works it is easy to make one long track out of the individual tracks, and this will play gaplessly perfectly. I would use foobar - select the tracks, right click, Convert, think of a name, and its done. For example, I would make each act of an Opera a track. Done wisely, this concatenation gives a better result than cds, which often have cd breaks at annoying places in a large piece. Gaps between acts are not an issue - you get 30 minutes at Covent Garden!

I think this is quite a reasonable work round until such time as Naim, like Linn, get gapless playback working.

Thank you very much for this workaround. I was not aware of the "convert" option in Foobar.

Do you know if the conversion is done "perfectly"?

Alamanka - I wasn't aware of it either until recently. I can't prove that the concatenation is done 'perfectly', all I know is that I can't hear any gaps in the choral works I experimented with. I can't see any reason why the conversion shouldn't be perfect though. Might be worth enquiring on a foobar forum.

Another possibility, if you rip to flac, is to use the FLAC frontend - this has an option to treat input files as one album.

quote:

Originally posted by Alamanka:


Thank you very much for this workaround. I was not aware of the "convert" option in Foobar.

Do you know if the conversion is done "perfectly"?

Why don't you rip the CD as a single image in the first place?
If it is a live CD or operatic/choral work there won't be any gaps on the CD anyway, so your single image rip won't have them either.

I don't see the purpose of this detour via single tracks and glueing them together again, unless I'm overlooking something?

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aleg

The gaps are added by the UPnP malarkey, not the ripping - I can play (dBpoweramp) rips back gaplessly on my squeezebox, but when I play the same back through a UPnP chain, small gaps get added.

Ripping a cd as a single image (not sure what you use to do that in any case) wouldn't often be much use for opera or choral works - there might be more than one work per cd, or less than one work.

It's only a workround until Naim manage to catch up with Linn and offer gapless UPnP playback in any case ..

quote:

Originally posted by likesmusic:
The gaps are added by the UPnP malarkey, not the ripping - I can play (dBpoweramp) rips back gaplessly on my squeezebox, but when I play the same back through a UPnP chain, small gaps get added.

I know indeed that it is a feature of UPnP not to be able to play gapless.
Proprietary modifications are needed to have UPnP play gapless.

quote:

Ripping a cd as a single image (not sure what you use to do that in any case) wouldn't often be much use for opera or choral works - there might be more than one work per cd, or less than one work.

Single image rips are a standard feature of nearly all ripping software. EAC and dBPoweramp are two of the most used rippers and both offer the feature. For already ripped CD's one could use something like CUETools to recreate the original single image as long as one has kept the original cue-sheet with all the gap information.

Indeed for works that are not limited to exactly one CD, my suggestion doesn't work fully.

quote:

It's only a workround until Naim manage to catch up with Linn and offer gapless UPnP playback in any case ..

It is more that Naim offers standard UPnP and that Linn has made a proprietary modification. It is a akward choice to either keep yourself to the standards or go your own way.

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aleg

aleg - I'm lost. You say that you know "that it is a feature of UPnP not to be able to play gapless" and suggest a 'single image rip'.

I can't find a 'single image rip' feature in dBpoweramp - I always get a file corresponding to each individual track.

So, where is the ripping option in dBpoweramp to rip multiple tracks to a single (gapless) track that will play back gaplessly over standard UPnP?

Can you specify which tracks - as in an Act of an opera - are turned into a single image?

quote:

Originally posted by likesmusic:
aleg - I'm lost. You say that you know "that it is a feature of UPnP not to be able to play gapless" and suggest a 'single image rip'.

I can't find a 'single image rip' feature in dBpoweramp - I always get a file corresponding to each individual track.

So, where is the ripping option in dBpoweramp to rip multiple tracks to a single (gapless) track that will play back gaplessly over standard UPnP?

Can you specify which tracks - as in an Act of an opera - are turned into a single image?

dBPoweramp offers single image rips with cue file from version R14 and you need to install the "[CUE Sheet Image] Utility Codec" which can be found on the dBPoweramp forum under "Beta Testing: Test Pre-Releases". In the CD Ripper you than select Rip to: "Cue Sheet Image".


Gapless in my vocabulary means that an audio player will play two separate audio files (each with one track) without a pause in between the two tracks.

If a CD has gaps between tracks than these gaps are coded on the CD, but the CD can also have tracks that are gapless and in that case no gaps are coded on the CD. That is why EAC offers the option to scan for gaps and dBPoweramp shows it is scanning for gaps.

With UPnP, because it cannot play gapless, even though tracks have been ripped gapless the player cannot replay them gapless. To be able to do so it has to prefetch the following track before the previous track has finished. AFAIK that is not yet defined in the UPnP standard, but is what Linn has added themselves.

To circumvent this behaviour of UPnP you can rip a gapless CD (so no gaps defined on the CD) as a single image. In that case the UPnP player doesn't have to fetch the 'next' track because it is only a single track (consisting of the complete CD). The downside of this is that you cannot skip tracks because for UPnP it is only a single track, unless UPnP is capable of handling cue sheets (and I don't know that since I don't use UPnP) which define the start points of tracks within the image.


With dBPoweramp you can create a subset of tracks for a single image by unmarking the tracks you don't want into the rip.
At this moment after ripping, you have to manually change the cue-file because all tracks are added to the cue file but the image only contains the selected tracks. I have filed an error report about this behavour. But the change is only to delete the lines of the tracks that were not ripped.


To read about gaps and how rippers handle them read here: Gaps & Cue
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aleg

likesmusic: The is a button in dBpoweramp that says "rip as 1" its on the menu bar at the top.

Dave

quote:

Originally posted by divuk83:
likesmusic: The is a button in dBpoweramp that says "rip as 1" its on the menu bar at the top.

Dave

I find that difficult to use, because you have to manually select the start and end point of the rip in terms of frames or time. You can't really know if you are on a tracks boundaries.

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aleg

quote:

Originally posted by divuk83:
likesmusic: The is a button in dBpoweramp that says "rip as 1" its on the menu bar at the top.

Dave

Cheers. Haven't seen that before - seems very clunky to use. I use squeezebox/center which manages gapless playback without such messing about, and means I can preserve track names in an opera too, or play individual 'tracks' - an aria say - if I wish. I went hunting for the foobar type solution when messing around with UPnP and finding, like the o/p, irritating gaps inserted. The foobar type conversion I suggested is much quicker than re-ripping. Still exceedingly aggravating. Play should mean "Play", not "Play and stick in gaps that I didn't ask for and weren't there in the first place".

Perhaps Naim will get gapless playack on UPnP working soon; perhaps dBpoweramp will get Asset control, which also promises gapless playback, working sooner! (They are talking 3-4 weeks for the Linn extensions). Meantime, if you have already done your ripping, I think the solution I proposed is the quickest, and gives the best result.

Aleg & Likesmusic, thanks a lot.

Just to summarize the workarounds for the absence of Gapless feature:

1- If you are able to anticipate the issue: rip CD as a single image (for instance using Exact Audio Copy). It will be played gapless, but the CD tracks are not anymore available for selection.

2- If you did not anticipate the problem before ripping: use "convert" option in Foobar to glue multiple tracks together. We do not know however if such approach is detrimental to the quality.
This option is also useful if you want to combine tracks from different CDs.

Right now, I am ripping 2 copies: one with multiple tracks and another one single image.

This is more ripping and editing work and also uses more disk space and I am not happy about this.

As a customer, I was disappointed to encounter this issue after I bought the NaimUniti. (Naim engineers probably do not listen to opera...)

I hope a firmware solution will be provided.

quote:

Originally posted by Alamanka:
Aleg & Likesmusic, thanks a lot.
...
use "convert" option in Foobar to glue multiple tracks together. We do not know however if such approach is detrimental to the quality.
...

Hi Alamanka

It won't be detrimental to sound quality because it is only joining the bits together, there is no processing or conversion whatsoever.

It just like ripping to multiple tracks which just cuts a string of bits after bit x.

Now it is just joining two strings of bits.

No SQ issue, just loss of convenience because there is no skipping anymore.

I would hope for all Uniti users that Naim finds a solution to this.
It is dreadfull listening to gapless music with gaps forced into it.

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aleg

Alamanka - I sympathise with your aggravation. Here is a suggestiong which might make the process less tedious.

You are uncertain whether the 'foobar' join process harms sound quality. But it is much quicker than ripping twice, so if you could be sure there was no loss in sound quality you would probably use it.

So, why not do a multi track rip, the same rip to a single track, then use foobar to convert the multi track rip to (another) single track rip. Foobar has a 'compare audio' plug in that you can use to compare the audio of the two single track rips. If they are identical you have no worries. dBPoweramp can also calculate the checksum of both rips. Again, if they are identical you have no worries.

I might try the same myself!

(You might also ask your NAIM dealer to do all this work for you - he most certainly should have made you aware of such issues before taking your money).

Update to above - I've done my own test:

I used dBpoweramp to rip an opera cd to individual tracks.

I used dBpoweramp to rip the same cd to one track.

I used foobar to convert the individual tracks from the first rip to another single track.

I used foobar to bit compare the two single tracks - they were identical.

I used dbPoweramp batch convert to compute the checksums of the two single tracks - they were identical.

So, it is reasonable to conclude that foobar joins tracks perfectly, and as it is about 10 times quicker than re-ripping, thats the way I'd go.

Likesmusic, thanks for doing and publishing the results of these tests. This is useful and I am going to try the Foobar joining technique.

Regarding you comments on the Naim dealer that he should have known about gapless: in my case the pre-sales demo of the Uniti was done with CD.

The dealer was not able to connect the Uniti to his own router and demo the UPNP feature at all.

So we could argue that he did not sell me the UPNP features... I imagine that from his point of view, this is not a supported feature.

For the anecdote: during the discussion, I told him that based on the specs of the machine, I thought it was probably possible to control the Uniti remotely from a computer, he looked at me as if I were a slightly disturbed person and told me he did not think so.

When it comes to complex products involving software, it is not uncommon that users end up knowing more than people working in Sales, Marketing or similar intermediate positions. This is just the way it is.

Anyway, I can understand that gapless over UPNP is not a trivial feature. But not having it is truly an issue from a listener's point of view.

Problems like this are difficult to get fixed, because it is not really a new feature, it is not trivial to fix, and you can work around it in a demo, so for Sales it is not a show stopper. It makes people upset, but only AFTER they have bought. So it is a low priority item.

Thanks again for the workaround.

current shipping Qute and Digital iPod Uniti do have gapless support
- the software release at the end of september for existing uniti customers (the one that enables n-Stream support) will also support gapless
- NDX will support gapless

quote:

Originally posted by Paul Stephenson:
current shipping Qute and Digital iPod Uniti do have gapless support
- the software release at the end of september for existing uniti customers (the one that enables n-Stream support) will also support gapless
- NDX will support gapless

Paul, this is wonderful news.

quote:

Originally posted by Alamanka:

quote:

Originally posted by Paul Stephenson:
current shipping Qute and Digital iPod Uniti do have gapless support
- the software release at the end of september for existing uniti customers (the one that enables n-Stream support) will also support gapless
- NDX will support gapless

Paul, this is wonderful news.

Is gapless (or as iPhone wants to say hapless) support only with Naim's UPnP server or should it work with Twonky, Asset, etc?

And with all file formats or just .WAV

And do the Uniti / UnitiQute and HDX support AIFF and Apple Lossless via UPnP now?

Eloise

Hi Eloise,

SteveH from Naim R&D here.

Gapless will work from any UPnP server but it assumes (at the moment)

a) The ripping engine that ripped it did a good job and the rips will actually join together.

b) The rips are in a lossless format (WAV or FLAC)

c) Use either the front panel GUI or the nStream iPhone/iTouch/iPad compatable app to control it.


As for formats, AIFF is coming for the NDX product and will trickle down to Uniti and Qute. Most good UPnP servers can transcode to either LPCM or WAV making the streamers play the audio in a non-compromised manner.

HDX, NSxx and UnitiServe (the server range) already supports AIFF and Apple Lossless.

Regards

Steve

quote:

Originally posted by Stevesky:
Hi Eloise,

SteveH from Naim R&D here.

Gapless will work from any UPnP server but it assumes (at the moment)

a) The ripping engine that ripped it did a good job and the rips will actually join together.

b) The rips are in a lossless format (WAV or FLAC)

c) Use either the front panel GUI or the nStream iPhone/iTouch/iPad compatable app to control it.
Steve

Steve,

Thank you for providing additional details, but as usual, details are where the devil is.

All of a sudden, I feel worried.

What do you mean by

"a) the ripping engine that ripped did a good job and the rips will actually join together"?

"c) Use either the front panel GUI or the nStream iPhone/iTouch/iPad compatable app to control it. "

Several of us among Uniti owners are using:

- Exact Audio Copy for ripping
- Foobar2000 UPnP as a controller
- Andromote (Android app) as a controller

So I guess our expectations is that it will work with those tools.

Can you provide any visibility on that?

I understand we are late in the cycle, but I am personally willing to invest my own time in helping to test the gapless feature using those tools. Is there a "beta" program we can participate? Essentially this would be a matter of having a early firmware upgrade, then testing and providing you feedback.

Thanks and regards