New streamer

Posted by: MartinStubbs on 25 February 2013

First post, so hope someone can help
Having being a Naim user for many years I recently decided to take the plunge and move to streaming. I'm certainly impressed, but am coming across some problems with the ND5XS receiving certain files. Most of my music is either ripped from the original CD, or downloaded. These appear as MPEG3 files. More recently I've been ripping in lossless format - WMA. These all play ok
The music is stored on a couple of PCs and I've bought a Synology NAS to act as server. On transferring files to NAS (which appears to be successful) I find those saved as MPEG3 play fine, but those on lossless WMA won't play, showing invalid file type on the ND5 XS
I hope it's me missing some obvious point, but I'd really value any advice you can offer
Martin
Posted on: 25 February 2013 by PinkHamster

What is the bit rate of your WMAs? Looking at the specs of the ND5XS tells me that it will only support WMA files up to 320kbits.

 

Besides, to my knowledge WMA is not lossless.

 

Ah, just did some reading. There is also WMA lossless. But that might be the crux, as your streamer doesn't support it.

 

Why don't you simply transcode to flac, aiff or wav?

Posted on: 25 February 2013 by Iver van de Zand

Hi Martin,

 

As PinkHamster already suggested, I would definately try to get your music transferred to the more obvious formats like FLAC or AIFF, both lossless formats. If your current WMA's are from the lossless type, you can simply transcode to ie FLAC. If your WMA's are compressed, transcoding to FLAC is technically possible, but will never get you a high quality file. In that case you might want to re-rip your CD's.

 

point is that your ND5XS is of such good quality, that it can easily show/proveyou the difference between compressed and lossless rips.

 

good luck

iver

Posted on: 26 February 2013 by Stoik

No need to transcode anything. Just install a good uPnP server software on your NAS, and life will be good again.Twonky seems popular for this.

 

Bye.