Unitiserve HiRes downloads and tagging

Hi Paul,

Now that you've entered the world beyond letting the uServe do cd rips, you'll want, and need, to learn some basics of tagging.

Do you use a Mac or PC at home?  You'll want to do your tag viewing and editing on your home computer, so you'll need a tag editor. 

I truly believe that you'll be MOST happy if you stick to the flac format for files to be stored in your new Downloads folder.  Tagging flac files is much more standardized than tagging wav files. 

The next steps are easy. 

1.  You will want to populate your Downloads folder with folders for each artist.  Use Finder (if you use a Mac) or whatever the file manager is called in Windows to create the artist folders.  So for example, use your computer to create a folder within Downloads called Jerry Garcia.

2.  Put your Jerry Garcia album on your computer if it's not there already, and convert it to flac format if its not flac already.  Open it using the tag editor you downloaded.  Look at the tags for the important fields -- Album (the Album name) Artist (sometimes called Album Artist), Track Title, Track Number(s), Year, etc.  Edit them if needed.

3.  For the album cover art, you want a file named folder.jpg to be in the folder with the music tracks.  You can go online and download the cover art in jpg format, and rename that file to folder.jpg

4.  Make sure that this Jerry Garcia album is in a folder named something appropriate, like Jerry Garcia - Complements of Garica.  Drag and drop that folder into the Jerry Garcia artist folder you created in downloads, so that it'll copy over to there.

5.  Once in Downloads, the uServe will eventually index it and it'll appear in the Naim app.  You can force the indexing by using the Desktop Client or n-Serve (for OS X if a Mac user) and telling the uServe to re-scan the Downloads folder ("share").

That's it!  Let us know if you need help.

Bart, what is the rationale for naming folders with artist names? In which folder would one have to put an album whose items are tagged with, say 7 artist names? Would one have to make 7 copies of this album (one for each folder named after one of the 7 artists)? I am probably missing something obvious but naming folders with artist names doesn not seem a very good idea to me. Thanks, nbpf

Simple. Have a folder named Various Artists or Compilations and keep the album folders there.

Bart,

this is a great help, thanks so much for taking the time to write it.

I'll have a go at this next weekend when time and patience permit. 

What at has really puzzed me is how everything works fine when loaded onto a USB stick, but does not work so fine when the same files are copied from the USB stick to the Downolads folder. Any offers ?

thanks, 

Paul

You're welcome, Paul.  The system to read files from the USB stick is really quite distinct from the other operations.  The USB stick is nice, but obviously not a long-term solution for a large music library.  Getting it all on the uServe now that you've done the 2tb upgrade should be much more convenient for you once you get the tagging issues sorted out.

I see, thanks! The approach would not be very useful for classical music, however. Does the UnitiServe software rely on this or any other particular folder denotation scheme or is this just your own way of organizing your music collection? Could one use a deep folders hierarchy (say, for example, Composer>Work>Conductor>Ensemble or Composer>Work>Ensemble>Conductor) with the UnitiServe software? Are there any non-obvious limitations one should be aware of? Thanks, nbpf

Indeed, I organise my classical music collection in folders by Composer> Type of Composition (e.g. symphony/concerto/choral etc.) and have a master folders for Classical and Non-Classical music.

I actually use different UPNP servers for Classical (Minimserver) and non-Classical (Asset) as this makes using different tagging schemes for browsing easier.

I should have said that I am however using a QNAP NAS rather than a US.

What do you exactly mean by "works fine" and "does not work" ?

When you browse/play through your files on a USB stick you browse/play by folder, I assume. This implies, in particular, that files are played in alphabetical (track) order.  Do you also browse/play by folder when you access the files that you have copied to the Downloads folder?

If not, then what happens is very obvious: you are using two different views of the same files. The second one (the one on the files in the Download folder) depends on your tags (which might be screwed up), the first one is tags independent.

If yes, then only Naim can tell, I guess.

I see, thanks! Best, nbpf

The Naim upnp server is very  hard on what it believes to be wrong tags. Actually the 1.7B firmware that I am sure is installed on your userve rejects tagged files that before worked fine. Often you need to check some of what mp3 tag calls exteneded tags, and remove everything that concerns sortOrder in the tag name. Also the tag called originalArtist wich of course is different from artist if used, makes the  album show up as unknown artist even though the artis tag  is correct. This is one of the few irritations with the Naim upnp server. At least some kind of log when this occurs would be nice.   

Hi nbpf,

what I meant was the following. With music on USB sticks, the music was stored under folders of the artist name, followed by a sub folder of the album name, within each album being the individual album tracks. Each track name is pre-fixed by the track number - 01, 02, 03 etc. Naim software / App integrates the music beautifully into one seamless library of ripped CDs and music on sticks, so that if I browse by artist, say Rolling Stones, I see all albums regardless of source.

This aspect still seems to work when using the downloads folder.  But in several instances when I select a track from n-Serve app, it actually plays a different track from the correct album.  This is what I meant by doesn't work.

Any help appreciated - it so nearly works, and if I can avoid tagging everything manually then that is the preferred route.

cheers, Paul 

Interesting Claus-Thoegersen. Do you know whether there is any detailed documentation of the Naim UPnP server? It would be interesting to know how it compares to other popular UPnP servers. Best, nbpf

Thanks Paul, at least I understand the problem now. It seems quite ovbiously related to indexing, as Claus-Thoegersen suggests. Unfortunately, there seems to exist virtually no publicly available documentation for n-Serve and for the server running on the UnitiServe that n-Serve controls. Under these premises, the only suggestion I can offer you is to contact Naim's technical service. Best, nbpf

Some additional advice that helped me in a number of situations ...

Rename all file to something like this <track no> - <artist> - <track name> ... this can be done batch wise by many converters or tag-editors. This will help you if you by accident screw up the tags and suddenly lost the order of tracks in your album, then just look at the file name.

Whenever you download HQ music you can add something like "96/24" to the album name in your tag editor. This way you can also from album list in your iPad distinguish between CD quality albums and HQ albums if this is important.

How you organize the file structure doesn't matter from US perspective, but in order to make it easy for yourself it would be convenient to organize it according to Artist->Album->CD No.->Tracks.

I find XLD (Mac) very useful for converting between formats such as FLAC and WAV. And I have bought the tag editor Metadatics (for Mac via AppStore) - I can really recommend this tag editor.

Hi Paul -- some good advice here from us uServe owners.  Yes, it's rather picky about the content of tags, but as Claus writes that typically shows up as files or albums not wanting to be indexed at all.

The uServe definitely relies on tags for reading files from both its Downloads folder and from the usb stick.  File and folder names are not important other than that if they include non-standard characters they won't be indexed, so keep the character set used in file and folder names to letters and numbers (spaces are OK, as are - _ [ ] ( ) but I'd avoid other characters.

If you buy Metadatics, you can quickly take a look at the tags of an entire album before moving it onto the uServe's hard drive.  I really recommend that, and it's something you'll want to do as you buy new downloads.  It doesn't take much time and assures you that you'll get it right.

Finally, remember that the uServe doesn't (re)index immediately upon adding files to the Downloads or making a change to files already there.  That's one reason why it's best to examine and edit the tags on your computer before copying them over to the server.  And after adding a bunch of new albums, or making metadata edits, you may want to force a re-index.  And, if the server is running its scanning and indexing routine as you're adding more files, those may not get picked up immediately either.

My email is in my profile here; feel free to ask more questions as needed!