One feature I miss from the UnitiServe -- the "recently added" category

Look in  'Playlists' within Asset, i.e not the UPnP Playlists that the Naim app maintains and you access from the home screen.

These are in the Asset tree structure.

Within Asset's standard Playlists are 'Recent Albums' & 'Recent Tracks', well that's what is on the RPi version and I believe they are the same code base.

Simon

Simon are those 'recent' items recently played, or recently added to the database?  I'm looking for the latter.

Good question: does MinimServer has a similar functionality?

You have both on Asset - Recently added Albums/Tracks & Recently Played Albums/Tracks

Can't speak to Minimserver, as I have never used. I tried the DLNA product supplied with ReadyNAS (I have 3 ReadyNAS 2 bay units, for full redundancy at chassis & PSU level), then Twonky, which was hard work, before going down a dedicated RaspberryPi UPnP server solution, which did everything I wanted & Spoon/PeterP the developers continue to add functionality such as the DSD playback in R5, folder icons. Plus there is new functionality coming in an R6 release.

However if you want a good music library management system check out Roon, but there is a charge/cost.

see below from the App on my iPhone, the Playlists in the square brackets are maintained by Asset at a server level.

These look better on the iPad in grid form, but I wanted to give you the list.

Note: the custom icon set we have been working on in the 'Asset R5' thread. Plus how much better this looks than the simple lists we have on the current homepage of the Naim 5.0 app for the UPnP Playlists and iRadio Presets.

Huge hint to the Naim developers to improve this area for existing base without the latest Uniti products, as I have no intention of spending £1,650 or however many €'s for a Linux based UPnP server, when Asset R5 on a RaspberryPi2 with a linear power supply & a NFS mount to my NAS array, provides all the file serving functionality, along with album artwork & upstream artwork, customizable tree/folder layouts. Yes you do have to work at configuring the solution, maintaining the metadata, etc. But this is part of the fun & no dealer intervention/dependancy required.

BTW the linear power supply for the RPi is dual voltage powering the sub-network switch, a GS105E, eliminating switch mode supplies from the chain.

Hope that helps. Simon

Thanks Simon. As an aside, I do want Roon but am not interested at present in adding hardware "between" my nas/server and my NDS and/or my Qute2.  I'm pretty happy with the current interface, will use the newly discovered 'recent albums' and will wait a bit and see if/when/how Roon comes to Naim (or to a nas-based app).  

Yes, exactly my stance at present, with Asset on a dedicated RPI & NAS drive serving NDS, but the ideal solution for the Naim players to be Roon enabled Endpoints to give the option, but the Roon core still needs something more powerful that a standard NAS or RPi to run, a small NUC is suggested - let's wait & see what direction comes out.

Klout10 posted:

Good question: does MinimServer has a similar functionality?

I would also like to have this functionality with minimserver. Anyone able to offer guidance if it's doable?

simes_pep posted:

Yes, exactly my stance at present, with Asset on a dedicated RPI & NAS drive serving NDS, but the ideal solution for the Naim players to be Roon enabled Endpoints to give the option, but the Roon core still needs something more powerful that a standard NAS or RPi to run, a small NUC is suggested - let's wait & see what direction comes out.

Ahh yes I did read that - that the Roon core would choke most nas's. 

I'm sure someone has said on these forums that they had learnt from Naim that Roon will be enabled in due course.

If I understand rightly about Roon, that will presumably be the library and database/info aspects, nothing to do with Roon as a renderer and so nothing to do with sound quality.

Yes, the Roon core scans your disks, builds the library of the found content, but augments it with biographies, artwork, lyrics etc. Very similar to Rovi service, but associated with your content rather than an on-demand cloud based service. The additional hardware is for that, any transcoding requirements, and to serve the Endpoints.

The Endpoints then just be served in the specified file formats, such as WAV for any PCM content (FLAC, ALAC, AAC, MP3), native DSD64 & DoP (limited to DSD64 over 24/176.4 PCM). It would in fact transcode any DSD128 or DSD256 down to DSD64 supported by the NDS.

What would be cool, but I don't think will happen, is for Roon to unpack MQA files back as Hi-Res PCM for the endpoint. So they could be stored as MQA, but played as WAV at the highest format. At present this is done in the DAC stage (Certified MQA hardware) but I see no reason other than just licensing, why this could not be possible in the server/endpoint layer.

Innocent Bystander posted:

I'm sure someone has said on these forums that they had learnt from Naim that Roon will be enabled in due course.

If I understand rightly about Roon, that will presumably be the library and database/info aspects, nothing to do with Roon as a renderer and so nothing to do with sound quality.

Certainly no mention of Roon integration plans in future products when I with a few on this forum met with Naim a few weeks ago at Salisbury.

Chrome/Google Cast appears to be the new integration that Naim are excited about with the new products that may trickle up to the separates. There appears to be a conscious effort to rely less on European and US centric product/service integrations that otherwise limits the appeal in other world markets.

S

There is a post floating around from Phil Harris saying that Roon integration is 'on the list'  Let me see if I can find it....

https://forums.naimaudio.com/to...81#64499639869525481

pixies posted:

Klout10 posted:

Good question: does MinimServer has a similar functionality?

I would also like to have this functionality with minimserver. Anyone able to offer guidance if it's doable?

There is a recent post ('Recently added highlight') on the MinimServer forum saying this is on the roadmap, i.e. the functionality is currently not available.

/Peter

Bart - interesting well that was not forthcoming at the factory - and ChromeCast was the only thing mentioned for the reasons we were told that I stated earlier. There does seem to be a list of things to try and consider however - I suggested an item that was put on the 'list' - it appears these items are then considered on a number of fronts before budgets are agreed to develop them.. we shall see

S

peterks posted:

pixies posted:

Klout10 posted:

Good question: does MinimServer has a similar functionality?

I would also like to have this functionality with minimserver. Anyone able to offer guidance if it's doable?

There is a recent post ('Recently added highlight') on the MinimServer forum saying this is on the roadmap, i.e. the functionality is currently not available.

/Peter

Thanks Peter

It's been on the roadmap for absolutely ages. One of the main reasons I switched to Asset was to get this feature, as well as virtually instant automatic indexing of new albums, with no need to fire up the rather irritating minimwatch. 

Oh yes - for those considering/operating a non-Naim ripping, storage and serving solution and need a solution that works well with Classical music - there is a Beta version of CD Ripper in dBPowerAmp 16.2 for Windows, which adds the following:

"CD Ripper will display Work, movement number, count and name boxes when genre is classical or opera"

and will capture this information as part of the metadata during Ripping.

Asset already gives you the ability to sort and search on Composer, Conductor, Orchestra, Instrument, Soloists, Period, Style, etc and have these in your 'Tree Directory' or as part of a Dynamic Search, so you can develop a search for say

"Composed by Tchaikovsky, conducted by Valery Gergiev, performed by the Vienna Philharmonic", to browse to Symphony No.6 in B minor ‘Pathétique'

Of course, you do need to have tagged your content with these fields, so that Asset can scan and index the library for these fields for the search and dynamic browsing to work - either dBPowerAmp or mp3tag are good for these functions.

Roon, on the other hand, builds this information as part of the library as it scans your library, without all the tagging and metadata management, you can then 'focus' by Performer, Composer, Label etc., to find that Mercury Living Presence recording (or just go find the Vinyl pressing!).

Simon

simes_pep posted:

Oh yes - for those considering/operating a non-Naim ripping, storage and serving solution and need a solution that works well with Classical music - there is a Beta version of CD Ripper in dBPowerAmp 16.2 for Windows, which adds the following:

"CD Ripper will display Work, movement number, count and name boxes when genre is classical or opera"

and will capture this information as part of the metadata during Ripping.

Nice idea, but what happens if the genre is Choral, Unknown, or any of the other random genres that often appear on CDs? Or will the additional tags you mention become visible after you've edited the genre to classical manually?

The metadata tags involved are part of the ID3v2 definition - see https://xiph.org/flac/format.html#metadata_block for the metadata block used in the FLAC standard.

'Edit ID-Tag' in dBPoweramp gives you the ability to add and populate these.

It is just this Beta Release of CDRipper, if Genre is determined as Classical or Opera, during the metadata lookup process undertaken by dBPoweramp, will try to populate 'Work, movement number, count and name boxes'.

What I was trying to point out, is that there are software solutions, to populate the metadata during the ripping process, then manage/maintain the metadata to enable a sophisticated filtering, search and selection process without the need for a hardware solution such as a Uniticore (running Linux) or Unitiserve (running embedded Windows), which is functionality doing the same but without the cost.
Plus there are better software solutions, such as Roon for library management, and although there is an annual cost.

The problem I found ripping CDs is that metadata was inconsistent, for example two different versions of the same classical piece, one having genre classical and the other symphony, or one having artist as the composer, the other as the conductor, or some albums listing composer as Johann Sebastian Bach, another J.S.Bach, and another Bach J.S. 

I don't know if CDripper would resolve all of these? I suppose if it only does some fixes it would be worth it, but either way the key, which cannot be overemphasised, is to check and if necessary fix metadata for every album immediately: once you have many 100s of albums with incorrect/inconsistent metadata it is a nightmare to try and fix - the same applies ripping LPs, though in some ways no metadata is better than bad.

When I had an ND5XS it readily allowed browsing via my structured folder filing system, so metadata was never an issue - the inability to do so smoothly is the one and only gripe I have with AUdirvana, which I would dump on those grounds if it didn't sound so good.

Just a point to note - MP3 uses ID3v2 tags amongst other ID3  versions, but FLAC uses Vorbis Comments which is a separate specification which doesn't entirely map to ID3v2 tags.... so not all ID3v2 tags are present in FLAC and vice versa. WAV in many encoders can now be set up incorporate ID3v2 tags - but by extension some WAV tags can't reliably map to FLAC and vice via versa.... good game...

Yes - the Vorbis Comment spec is at https://xiph.org/vorbis/doc/v-comment.html, however when used dBpoweramp, Asset and mp3tag these are largely transparent, and allow the tracks to be tagged, catalogued, indexed and searched for. The metadata details are then embedded within the files and not a separate database.