Ripping Logistics

Hi Dozey,

Glad to to hear its all going well.

If you can be bothered, I would also recheck for better cover art than the one automatically given by AMG, as there is often better images out there, mostly with regard to the colour as opposed to image size. It may seem a hassle now but you will not regret it when you see the cover art on a IPad Mini and upwards. Also I found that it was better to check each rip at the time while the next one was ripping As you can imagine doing this to many at one time, anyway it takes a matter of seconds to do each one.

Happy ripping.

Jason.

Thanks Jason.

I did locate good cover art when I ripped many CDs to itunes last year, so I understand the motivation. Can I replace cover art using the DTC?

I believe so. I have only done that using the n-serve app on the iPhone or the Mini. I try to avoid the DTC if I can just because of my desire not to turn on a computer at home.

As far as I am aware, any ripping and it's editing can all be done via the n-serve app.

Jason.

Thanks. I will look into it. I need to understand n-serve obviously!

Doh! It is so simple and intuitive! Thanks for the heads up Jason.

I've done all my 2,000 albums, which took several weeks of tedium, but now they are in the loft it's great. Change the album art using the nServe app. Beware that if you upgrade to ios 7 the change album art feature does not work. So stick with ios 6. Naim are working on this - it was OK on the Beta but not the finished article.

Don't worry HH - I am not the type to update software before hearing of any problems!

It will be interesting to see how many albums I actually have. Never been tempted to count them before. I have ripped 160 and am at Art Blakey (I seem to have a lot of "B"s!)

Hi HH, just checked that out and yes you are right, complete shutdown.

I guess its a bug that will be easily fixed soon.

I had not realised that.

jason.

I would be interested to know how many discs you find which either: i) fail to start to rip, or ii) omit some tracks from the ripped copy, or iii) rip all tracks yet leave some with digital noise/skipping in the ripped copy. Only one of my discs is copy protected (which I haven't even tried to rip), but having ripped some 1,150 or so discs I have had a 2% failure rate. Curiously these have all been in mint condition, had played perfectly well on my CD player, but have still failed in the rip process. Trevor Wilson at Naim Audio has been investigating this and has found that the problem is due to large  'C2' errors. Naim Audio has purchased new copies of some of the affected discs and has found that the new copies have ripped perfectly well. It seems to suggest that not all CDs are created equal and it is frustrating not to be able to play every album or track in my collection. I would be interested to learn  the experiences of others. 

Hi Clive,

Ive ripped approx 550 CD's and I've not had one that failed to rip.

Maybe I've been lucky.

The Serve has groaned a bit on some of my older CD's, and taken longer than usual to rip, but in the end, no errors.

I probably haven't listened to every CD I've ripped, but I'm not aware of any tracks that have been skipped.

same story regarding noise - not really noticed or done too many A to B comparisons, but I haven't really noticed anything untoward.

Interesting to hear your experiences though.

Presumably any of the above issues would show up as 'Errors' at the end of the rip?

Out of 2,000 I've had five rejects. The Serve just spits them out after a few minutes. Kate Bush's Aeriel is one of them, if anyone gas a copy that rips, I'd love to borrow it!

Hi Clive,

I have ripped about 600 cd's and there were two refusals and a number of very stubborn rips. However, no significant drama. I queried the Forum regarding the difficult rips, I.e. Why would some cd take up to 20 mins to rip and other the normal 5 mins. The general consensus was that some cd's were deliberately made to be difficult to rip, or that they were just difficult, difficult to be sure IMO.

Anyway here is my account of my first 4 days ripping on the new u-Serve and my queries and Forum responses....if interested.

https://forums.naimaudio.com/to...72#20432801642767272

Jason.

Yes, with version 1.7 of the desktop client software, it does report when tracks have been cancelled. In most cases, v1.7 will not allow a rip to get through unless the rip is clean, but I have still had one recent case where an imperfect rip has got through and been stored on the server. 

BTW I haven't listened to every disc I've ripped yet either as that would take rather a long time, but I did observe most of them on the DTC during the ripping process (sad, I know).

OK I am past 300 now. We are into Grateful Dead territory on the alphabetical list.

So far - only 1 disc refuses to rip after several attempts - Kula Shaker - K. One further disc ripped with incorrect identification and track listing - Vol 1 of the complete Donovan set (Breezes of Patchouli).

Doing the ripping reminds me of how many of my favorite albums I only have on vinyl!

One of my new 2TB Unitiserves had a disc failure last week and is currently back at Naim. Luckily I sync my music between all four Unitiserves so no big deal but all discs do fail and I urge you to sort out your backup sooner rather than later. 

I'm curious why you'd need four unitiserves. 

One in office in UK, and we split the year between UK, France and the US so we shall have music wherever we go. The main home one in the UK uses media kept on Synology NAS with 22 bays, the others have a copy of the music on the download folder. I Nikeware to keep them all in sync.

Wow. I would have thought one US with three NAS (one in each location) would have done the job.

Well logically if I was happy with a NAS I would have skipped the Unitiserve altogether. I rarely rip on the US, either downloading all my music from HD Tracks or Murfie. I just have not found a more reliable UPnP server. Other than my main system, my favourite implementations are a Unitiserve, a DAC with Volume Control, a pair of mono blocs and some PMC speakers. I love the way the ipad app works out where it is (which ofthe four systems)and syncs the library and lets me play music. 

Mind you, losing the hard disc made me question the sagacity of this approach.

Yeah, wow. How do you keep them synched? Do you schlep the USs from location to location?

Lumos that's quite a setup! 

My issues are far fewer -- two streamer players in the home, and a desire to have an iPod classic with copies of all of my music (only 900 cd's; not many by some standards!) and an iPhone with at least downloadable access to all of my music.

I've been OK thus far with the uServe's hdd being the primary store, nas as a backup, and usb external drive as a backup of the nas.  For iDevices, it's iTunes match.  I am fine with a lossy format for the iDevices.

If I had a second home and wanted a second copy of all of my lossless music there, I'd be tempted to try a 'cloud server' like the new WD MyCloud.  But as you say, the uServe is quite a nice UPnP server.

OK, we are up to the 500 mark now - Rolling Stones territory. Only three discs have refused to rip. Two triple albums ripped but with incorrect track listings on at least one of the discs. I have also found 2 empty jewel cases! Can't blame the unitiserve for those. Oh, and 1 cracked CD. So the fail rate is less than 1%.

I suspect after I rip my classical CDs there will be about 1500 in total.

Now ripped 1100 CDs, so that will be about 600 per month. Still only have 3 CDs which failed to rip. 3 or 4 required encouragement (i.e. inserting them 2 or 3 times), and one took about 30 minutes to rip for some reason. 3 more CDs have had errors on one or more tracks. What is slightly bizarre are the CDs where it rips one more track than on the track listing!

The NDS is now sounding damn fine!

Interesting thread. I've ripped just over 1200 CDs so far. Since the software upgrade to 1.7a on my unitiserve when I rip a CD it will always look at Freedb and not AMG, which is slightly annoying because I never get any cover art with Freedb and have to search for it myself. The Freedb system does bring back a lot of unknown albums, for example the latest from Arcade Fire - reflektor it didn't recognize either disk and so I had to manually edit.

I would like to hear about others storage strategies, so far I have two shared folders on my NAS one is a music store and has the 1200 albums and the other is for downloaded music which has 100 albums. I don't seem to be ripping so much these days so was thinking of creating a third shared folder for new rips and demoting the existing store to a network share. It might work a bit quicker when looking up the albums after a reboot.

Cheers

Tim