Naim Lossless Streaming Roadmap Campaign

George, the best advice I can give is not to fear exploring the different menus.  You are likely to find a variety of "Options" to pick from, perhaps including a bitrate option to chose the best quality music.

(I'm not a Qobuz user, sorry.  But I do find folks who did not grow up with computers and such reluctant to just 'explore' the software.  There is often a relatively unfounded fear that they will 'screw something up.'  If you just have a look . . . nothing untoward will happen and you will discover perhaps a wealth of features, as in, "Oh I didn't know this program would do THAT."  Metaphorically, have a walk around the stage just don't touch the bows rosin and sheet music and such   )

PS - Cheers for moving into this new technology and finding new music.  That's what this long thread is really about; getting access to technologies that will bring us new music.  Well that, and some post-New Years grumbling.

Well I now have gapless CD quality, but the titles are still jumbled and French!

It is as well that I have all my favourite operas already in iTunes. 

This is a short list of only Cosi, Figaro [Mozart], Don Giovanni, Magic Flute, and Beethoven's Fidelio, where I totally have fixed the tagging so that it is perfect. Perhaps I can fix Quobus to remove anomalies of playing order, but it looks a mammoth task!

As for quality, it is just as good as iTunes, but somewhat inspiring of dumbfounded fear of messing it all up!

Anyway it will serve a purpose for the free month, during which time, I shall find out if I can make a viable addition to my existing music library and the radio!

Thanks for all your patience!

ATB from George

George

there should be no difficulty in selecting an album on Qobuz, opera or otherwise, and then playing it from first track to last.

George, as Bart says keep persevering    Yes hopefully it should the same/similar as itunes playing lossless, the beauty here is that you have access to a huge library of music of course. there is no damage you can do to their files.. It's read only.

BTW when you log in do you see your user name in the top right of the Qobuz app with the words HiFi by it? I just wonder if it thinks you are French for some reason. having said that there are some commands in French but kind of ceases to be an issue whe you are used to it... anyway it allows you to try it out so you are ready if and when Naim integrate it.

Simon

Yes but forty tracks randomly ordered.  It would take half an hour to order the music as composed in a playlist, and life is too short for that.

I'd rather listen to iTunes which simply works.

I can see that if someone took the trouble to make a system that actually worked properly like iTunes does without fiddling, then it would diserve to be successful, but I shall not persist with Quobus, because I don't have the competence to fight its poor user interface, and clunky controls and mental tagging.

I am surprised that these issues were not sorted out before going public. With the system as it is it cannot appeal to more than a very small number of people with a considerable patience and computer operating ability.

Do any of you know if I can forestall the inevitable end of the free month and being presumably automatically charged without further notification?

ATB from George

George you log in to your profile and cancel your subscription under the 'subscription' tab. Scratching my head at tying to work out what you are looking at and expieriencimg you are really puzzling me,  but perhaps if you are used to itunes it might be safest to stick with that. Perhaps Qobuz is aimed at less computer itunes centric users or at least Apple centric.. Anyway at least you tried. 

I find the Qobuz classical streaming music selections one of the best out there.. but I am sure itunes is pretty good as well.

Simon

Dear Simon,

Thanks for your help.

Nothing ventured and nothing gained is true.

An experiment always yields valuable information even if it not  what was hoped ...

There is something very queer about Quobus. there is no subscription tab on my profile [as there is no language selection either]. The best is that I get the bank to change my card number so that they cannot draw on my account without me approving.  The user interface is nothing short of appalling. 

Sound quality is fine and the rest is utterly hopeless in my short experience. Most frustrated about a company that could hardly have done a more effective job of putting a potential subscriber off!

ATB from George

I managed to delist myself from Quobus via a reply to a confirmation email after quarter of an hour actually failing to find a way to do it on my Qubus profile section.

Delisting completed, thanks goodness. Never again will I attempt any subscription service over the internet. It is scarily difficult to control or obvious how you get out of it once in.

Very bad public relations really.

ATB from George

I might have given you a bum stear. Log in Qobuz.com - top right should be your account name, if not login. You will also see a union flag to the left of your account name if set for the UK.

click on your account name

then click on My music in the drop down that then appears,

you will then see your account details, and subscription history should be showing, if not select it

you will probably see something Streaming Subscription - Qobuz Hifi Monthly - 1 month free

underneath that you will have the option to cancel, and the status of the subscription should change to cancel or something similar.

Simon

Curious George. I have no problems with any of the issues you have encountered using Qobuz

Then again, I loathe iTunes so I guess it is largely a matter of what one is used to.

G

Dear Simon,

I have managed it, and then I took the bull by the horns and also cancelled my free month of Netflix, as this never worked as apparently it required a higher resolution than my old HP screen allowed!

A new screen would be a lot more than a few DVD in that case!

I am getting out of date! Too old to learn new tricks! Not the World's fault that it is moving along and leaving me in its wake!

Best wishes from George

Dear George,

I really sympathise with you over this. I did manage to get Quobuz working but then I'm reasonably computer literate. For those who might not be so familiar with computers the interface really stinks. Being so french doesn't help either, and I say that as someone who's part french. Lossless streaming's no use to me because my broadband is too slow, and unlikely to get any better where we live in the immediate future.

Before I retired my company developed computer software for use in healthcare services and I was always annoyed and frustrated by my IT guys who just assumed our potential customers should be able to work "their" system despite not being computer-literate, and regarded those folk as stupid. We lost business from that attitude so one wonders who was really stupid...

Gents, I take my hat of you. A great community spirit on here today. Also to Paul.I can't think of no other forum where both employees & senior personnel actively participate.

Most interesting read. 

Graeme - I agree and might help users such as George who are not at home with computer apps they are not familiar with.

Mrs S-in-S who I am sure won't mind me saying she is pretty well as un technically computer literate as they get - she certainly couldn't operate iTunes. But she can operate Sonos on her Android phone - and even manage her personal playlist and added a Qobuz track without prompting - i was dumbfounded ! (ok it was in the playlist twice - but even so). You can perhaps see what using software designed by the University of Cambridge gives you.

Simon

Paul, thanks for posting and glad you are listening.

Will Naim be at CES this year ?

Ok, I answered my own question - Naim will be in two suites on the 30th-212 and 35th-305 floors of the Venetian.  Looking forward to the announcements.

What's encouraging about the thrust of most threads here is that access to more music is the driving concern. Not new technology or advancing specification for its own sake.

'It's all about the music' as Neil Young once said, and so it is proving to be.

G

It would certainly speed up integration in (Naim) streamers if all these streaming services could agree on a common API. But not so, most sites (Spotify, Qobuz, Deezer etc) seem to have their own API. It must be very difficult for Naim to keep up with all these services which are currently popping up like mushrooms. 

+1 for @Wat

except about Ipswich Town, obvs. 

And mushrooms don't last long either.

ATB from George

 They are not so different, websites are not all built and designed the same and we can navigate them as people and browsers can display them legibly most of the time... There is not a huge difference to the web services (APIs) used with many of these streaming services. The hardest bits are the underlying protocols and codecs and these are all pretty much standardised.

Simon

Please tell us what the reason is.

And NAXOS have just announced a high-definition and lossless classical music streaming service that, they claim, will be able to stream up to 24/192 depending on your internet speed. It uses something they call "adaptive bit-rate streaming" which sounds like the quality adapts to the quality of your internet speed. That's another service for naim, Linn, Meridian etc. to add to the list of services to integrate. Bet someone in the Logitech Media Server open source community does it first though!

It seems to me that the only realistic way to make sure you can access these services from day one is to invest in a pc or mac and either a USB to s/pdif converter + DAC, or a DAC with USB input. There will always be a lag - sometimes  a very long one - before such services get integrated into the DLNA world.

Its disgraceful that its not yet available on our streamers, what on earth are Naim doing, surely they should have predicted this and implemented it by now?  Perhaps they should stop working on Quboz, or is it Tidal or Beats, or Spotify lossless, and start work on this one, it will surely only take an hour or so?   Shocking behaviour for a company of this stature!