I've got an HDX SSD which refuses to copy a number of CDs (perhaps it's my taste in music?) So I ripped the CDs to WAV format using Windows Media player and added the share to the HDX which all worked fine. The only issue was that on scanning the share, HDX makes use of the Artist information embedded in the WAV file (INFO IART) so where an album has lots of contributors you end up with multiple albums of the same name with slightly different artists (e.g. Handsome Boy Modelling School - White People).
Being a bit of a geek, I wrote a bit of code to read the WAV file format and remove the IART information. This works fine (the scan then uses the file folder name for the artist) but, I've lost the information about the collaborating artists.
So the question I have is: Are there any other pieces of WAV meta data that the HDX would understand which would allow me to store "Album Artist" as well as "Track Artist"? Alternatively, is there a way to get the HDX to look up the album information online for music stored on a network share rather than ripped by HDX?
Thanks,
Mark
Posted on: 26 April 2016 by robgr
The issue of multiple albums will not be fixed for the HDX
I now have a NAC-N 272 and the issue is not present
To look up album info try Shazam or SoundHound
Posted on: 26 April 2016 by hungryhalibut
The best decision I made was to keep all files in flac. You simply add the album artist tag, using something like dbpoweramp. You cannot do this for rips done by the HDX. Any flac files can be transcoded to wav, and will sound the same as wav originals.
Posted on: 26 April 2016 by Bart
+1 For your own rips, do them in flac, add in all your metadata, and then add them to the Share. Let the HDX transcode flac > wav if you like. In the end, you'll be much happier.
Posted on: 27 April 2016 by Mike Woodcock
This was the subject of a similar post by me last year. Basically, US doesn't handle various artists CDs very well, whether ripped to FLAC or WAV. It specifies the artist for each individual track as "Various Artists" making it impossible to do a search by artist to find a particular track. I adopted a hybrid approach, whereby I rip single artist CDs on the US to WAV, and multiple artist CDs to FLAC using DBPA. I store the compilation CD rips in a separate folder which I access via a MinimServer Share. I don't point my US at that share to avoid the 20X duplicate album issue!
I actually took my US to my dealer and we spent a whole Saturday morning together trying to work a way round this and failing. Both they and I have taken this up with NAIM technical support, but it is not something that is a priority for NAIM to resolve.
