Sonos and WAV

Thiem,

Are you streaming to a Sonos?

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.

I stream from my HDX to a Sonos and the wav files play perfectly but the metadata is all wrong. I have dbpoweramp but retagging the files from what I can see is a real pain and from what I understand won't produce the correct results anyway..

Frank,

I am streaming to Sonos as my secondary system. As control point software on my iPad I am using Songbook Lite and ELyric. Have no problems with metadata, genre etc.

Regards, Thiem

Thanks Thiem.

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.

Thiem (or anybody else), please can you expand on the software you're using?

I too have a Sonos 2nd system, but I can only access my music created on my HDX and stored on a NAS by looking at "Music Library" then "Folder" on the Sonos app.

I cannot search by album, artist, track etc.

Are you saying there is a way around this? I am not familiar with (or even heard of) Songbook Lite or ELyric so have no idea what they are or do.

Cheers, Martin.

Right, I've done a bit of searching and have a couple of questions:

Is SongBook Lite basically a different app, used to control the Sonos system (or HDX etc.) instead of using the Sonos app? (Or N-Serve with the HDX?)

In other words, do I install this SongBook Lite app and then be able to control my Sonos player, but with SongBook able to read the WAV tags which are saved on my NAS, which were created by my HDX?

Basically, that's what I want to achieve - I do not plan to re-rip 900+ CD's to another NAS just so I can select and play them on my 2nd system!

Sorry if I sound a bit ignorant, but I am !

Cheers, Martin.

I too have an HDX and use Sonos as a secondary system. 

Unfortunately, wav files created by the HDX are not tagged in a way that Sonos can recognise and I have found that you need to run a further program to add metadata, and sometimes also album art, in a form that Sonon will recognise.

MediaMonkey is free and works well.  Just upload the album file from your HDX Music Share to MediaMonkey, amend the properties (album name, track name, artist name and genre are the only bits of metadata that really work for wav files), add the album art if necessary (mostly it's there already) and Bob's your uncle.  Importantly, although Naim quite rightly tell you not to play around with files in your HDX Music Share, doing as I have just described with MediaMonkey has no adverse effect whatsoever.  It's labour-intensive, of course, as you have to do one album at a time but, when you get the hang of it, each one takes a couple of minutes max and for me it has become a routine process of buying new music, ripping or downloading to my NAS, then tagging with MediaMonkey.

dBPoweramp does the same job.  It's more sophisticated but you pay for it.

One thing I discovered the long, hard way: Sonos will only display album art in jpg format, and only if the image is called folder.jpg and there's only one such image in the album file.  This is often how the HDX will tag album art so it's fine for Sonos too but occasionally the HDX will have a png file which Sonos will not recognise.  In such cases you can look on the internet for a jpg image of the album cover, or there is a free program called Irfanview which will allow you to convert from one format to another.  Irfanview will let you batch-convert - you can search your Music Share for png files that are not being displayed on Sonos, and convert them all at once to jpg.

I'm unfamiliar with Songbook and Elyric.  Possibly they are a shortcut or a better solution to these issues but, if so, it's too late for me as I have already done it in the way described.

One last thing - Sonos won't display accented letters in track, album and artist names, at least not for wav files.  Words with accented letters end-up looking like swear words in comic books.  The HDX will display accented letters but, as it tags in a different way from the one Sonos recognises, this means you can use MediaMonkey or similar to rename (for Sonos only) using ordinary English letters eg, replace é with e or å with aa.

I hope this helps.

Thanks for your reply endlessnessism,

My Sonos does display all of album artwork (that I've looked at so far) which I suspect is due to them all being jpg and in the same folder.

I simply want to be able to locate "Artist" or "Album" or "Track" on the Sonos interface.

I can easily copy all the files tom my HDX to a second NAS which I can then treat it as totally separate to the HDX store, so corrupting the files in regards to the HDX isn't an issue.

I really don't wish to adjust or change over 900 CD's worth of files in order to do this - it took me months to rip the CD's to my HDX as it was!

From what a previous poster has said, I am wondering if "SongBook Lite" is some kind of controller/app/remote that you use instead of the Sonos iPhone/iPad app and that somehow, the SongBook app is able to read the HDX tagged WAV files, then sort & display them so they can be located by Artist, Album & Track?

If that is the case, then I'll simply ditch the Sonos app in favour of SongBook Lite 

DBPoweramp as I understand it, is Windows only and even if I were a Windows user, as a newbie, I'm not sure that it would be able to automatically tag/re-tag every song, or perhaps convert from the WAV files to FLAC or AIFF whilst retaining the WAV tag info (if you understand what I'm rambling on about....)

I am not familiar with the way that the HDX stores your music. Therefore, I can only confirm what works for me. My server is the US SSD with NAS (approx. 3,000 CD's). My second media player is the Sonos Connect (previously ZP90) which I have connected to my network wit CAT5 cable. I have not tried wireless. My control point software is Elyric from PS Audio running on iPad.

With this set-up I have access to exactly the same music information as with n-Stream and NDS. I am not using the Sonos interface/app on the iPad. In Elyric, you can choose server: US SSD and media renderer: Sonos Connect. It is as simple as that!

Have you tried going into advanced settings and setting Show Media Servers to on?

This should allow your Sonos system to find the UPNP Server on your network, when I do this it shows up my Asset UPNP server.  The browsing experience is different to the native Sonos as it is determined by the UPNP server but may do what you need.

Richard

So Elyric is simply a different controller software for the Sonos? (& other players) like I am thinking SongBook Lite is?

What is a US SSD?

My Sonos system can "find" the NAS and music store, so I cant really see what advanced setting will help me.
It (the Sonos app or equipment which is a Sonos Connect) simply cannot read the tag data well enough to enable me to search by track, or album etc. Currently, I get a list of each artist's folder, so I can find things by scrolling through every artist and play them,I  just can't search for anything else!

I'm sure someone here will know the answer 

I can't see the point of using Elyric or Songbook to operate Naim servers - nServe and nStream do a great job and they're free. 

It would be a different story if Elyric or Songbook allowed you simultaneously to play the same thing on Naim in one room and on Sonos in another but that's not going to work.

Elyric or Songbook may possibly solve the tagging problem - Sonos control software not recognising the tags that Naim (HDX anyway) uses for for wav files.  If it does, that's great and it will avoid the labour-intensive job of re-tagging via MediaMonkey or DBPoweramp.  Unless they do this, though, it's hard to see why you'd want to use anything other than Sonos software (which is great) to control Sonos. 

Thanks - obvious really US SSD!!!! I'm not used to so many abbreviations!! 

I love N-Serve for controlling my HDX and wouldn't consider using anything else.

I am going to bite the bullet and for the price of a cheapish bottle of wine, buy Elyric and see if it will control my Sonos and show the Naim HDX generated tags :-)

I'll let you know!

Well it seems I'm part way there. If I select the NAS as the music store in Elyric, Elyric only shows a few MP3 files which are in the "Downloads" folder on my NAS. I can't get it to see my main "MQ" folder.
There is an option to "manually add" a device (I'm hoping to be able to add the URL to the precise "MQ" location) but so far have drawn a blank as the URL must be a "Device Description XML File" which may as well be Chinese to me....

If I could actually see the entire URL for my NAS on Elyric, I'm sure I could copy it and alter it to add manually & hopefully work, but it only shows part of it :-(

If I chose my Naim HDX as the Media Server, all albums display correctly, so I know it "can" work. I just need to be able to connect to the correct folder on the NAS to use that as the server!

I have emailed Elyric as I cannot find any info on the Internet to help me.

Actually, if I am playing something on my main system, using the HDX and N-Serve, I can use Elyric and simultaneously play the same music from the HDX through the Sonos system. 

"Actually, if I am playing something on my main system, using the HDX and N-Serve, I can use Elyric and simultaneously play the same music from the HDX through the Sonos system. "

Well that's a bonus!!  Afraid I'm not excellent with networking, hence why I have an HDX (non SSD) which works great for my needs.  Perhaps with a little experimentation and hopefully a useful response from the Elyric support, you should get there.

Good Luck.

I have been asked to email a few screen shots of my NAS settings etc. to the nice gentlemen at Elyric. Hopefully they will be able to advise where I might be going wrong.

One thing I did discover is that "Media Sharing" was not enabled on the folder containing my music. However, after enabling, my music was still not showing :-(

I will keep you posted.

Sounds helpful.  I hope they can pinpoint the answer for you.  Be interesting to see how you get on.

i didn't even realise you could use Naim servers to send music to Sonos, so I've learnt something anyway!

Well although I received an initial response from the guys at Elyric, I am still waiting for an answer. They seem to be ignoring me now :-(

Also, the app keeps crashing, all the time and is now unusable.

I think I really need some way to re-encode the WAV files made by the HDX into something that CAN be read by the Sonos AND retain the metadata.

I'd prefer to keep them uncompressed/lossless but as it's only a second system, I'm not too bothered if the files aren't "the last word" in quality.

Does anyone know if this is possible and if so, using what? A batch converter would be ideal - and hopefully, be Mac friendly 

I've just skimmed the thread, hopefully I caught the gist of it.

Doesn't the Naim server app or DTC now support ripping to FLAC and by that logic batch transcoding from WAV to FLAC and hopefully on the fly transcoding from FLAC to WAV? 

If so, how about transcoding your entire library to FLAC? Sonos reads it fine. Second step would be to transcode FLAC files to WAV on the fly for your Naim streamer....

Complicated yet rather simple really....

BUT does Naim support this?

Reference the above bit from my earlier post, I have now got myself into a tangle.

Playing around with dBpoweramp, I took a wav music file that I had originally ripped from vinyl using Audacity, then tagged with MediaMonkey.  The track names were in French, and all the accented letters appeared correctly on my HDX but like cartoon swear words on Sonos.  I had thought Sons was the problem but it was actually MediaMonkey, because I was able to re-tag the same file using dBpoweramp and suddenly the accented letters appeared correctly in Sonos. 

HOWEVER, while the accented letters were correct, Sonos had now lost the track numbering.  It's not clear to me whether this is because Sonos cannot recognise dBpoweramp track numbering at all, or whether it's the result of tagging with MediaMonkey and then tagging with dBpoweramp.  I'll have to experiment further.

I've been looking into all the available options.

Reading up on firmware 1.7a it would appear that you can convert the entire HDX library to FLAC, replacing the original WAV files.

You can also choose to rip all future CDs to FLAC

The option to create MP3 versions means you keep the original WAV files and the MP3s are saved to a different location. What bit-rate are the MP3s encoded at?

Can anyone confirm that converting the entire WAV library to FLAC will retain/embed the tags that are associated with the original WAV files?

If so, this might be the way for me to go.