Can you stop Naim app searching for new album art when checking metadata?

Tapping the book takes you to the Rovi database. It as nothing to do with the album's metadata. It sometimes gets the wrong album but you can search for the correct one. 

There is a solution. Don't use Rovi. It's useless. A wall to wall load of shit which Naim should have dropped years ago.

I really like the Rovi booklets and find the reviews useful and well written. I wouldn't want to lose them. 

Harry posted:

There is a solution. Don't use Rovi. It's useless. A wall to wall load of shit which Naim should have dropped years a

More Naim software problems  ??? Not their strongest suit..

It's not Naim software. It's a third party facility linked to the Naim app that can't do cover art, publishes reviews and articles that contain factual inaccuracies and thinks it knows what music I will like based on the album I am listening to. But those of us who don't like it don't have to use it. I hope Naim are not paying for this pigs breakfast because that means we all are.

Hungryhalibut posted:

Tapping the book takes you to the Rovi database. It as nothing to do with the album's metadata. It sometimes gets the wrong album but you can search for the correct one. 

As I indicated in my original post, searching often serves no purpose, as the correct album is not displayed in the results.

Does the Naim app offer a way to browse all the metadata stored in each file?

If you are using a Core, I believe it does, but if not, it doesn't. Why would you want to see it? 

Harry posted:

There is a solution. Don't use Rovi. It's useless. A wall to wall load of shit which Naim should have dropped years ago.

I wouldn't agree with this - at its best, Rovi can contain a lot of useful information. The quality can be a bit variable, and it does occasionally mis-identify the album, but it's not that bad. If you want to see album info done badly - or not at all - try Tidal.

ChrisSU posted:

Harry posted:

There is a solution. Don't use Rovi. It's useless. A wall to wall load of shit which Naim should have dropped years ago.

I wouldn't agree with this - at its best, Rovi can contain a lot of useful information. The quality can be a bit variable, and it does occasionally mis-identify the album, but it's not that bad. If you want to see album info done badly - or not at all - try Tidal.

Yes. I'm being somewhat slap stick in my criticism. However, if they can't get it right all the time why do they bother? I think it must be someone's vanity project. If it's 70% correct (which I would say is a generous estimate) why would you waste your life wading  in what might be the 30% of rubbish in the system. 

I wish Naim would provide a bolt-on for custom user information. Maybe just open up the tag display facility (which goes back more towards the OP). There's a load of personal and public domain material out there which is verified and of high quality. I'd love to incorporate stuff like this into my database, as opposed to someone's efforts, copy and pasting results, and opinion. My reminiscences, concert reviews,photos, etc.  Just for me. Why would I want the Naim app to give me someone elses opinion and secondhand accounts?

[@mention:1566878603999558] With Core ripped CDs, there is sometimes a review from Rovi which is shown alongside the album art on an iPad (see screenshot), or below the track listing on an iPhone. This is often interesting but sometimes the review is so upsetting that I had to find a way of hiding it (change the metadata source). After doing this, it struck me that it would be great if we could edit the contents of this panel. I don't much like scrolling album, artist and track title tags so tend to shorten them but there's often additional information that I would like to see, for example, for the wonderful Argo recording below, it could include the soloists, date (1968) etc.

This is top of my wish list for the Core, and given there is already a mechanism for storing the Rovi Review, it shouldn't be too hard to turn it into an editable field, similar to the Album, Artist, Track Titles and Artwork that can already be edited. 

david

Hungryhalibut posted:

If you are using a Core, I believe it does, but if not, it doesn't. Why would you want to see it? 

I don't have a Naim Core, but if the Naim app can read metadata from the files stored in that server why would it not read the same metadata from the same files stored in my Synology NAS? 

The Naim app's 'Playing now' screen only displays two items of metadata. In my case, that is the track title (e.g. II. Moderato (poco allegretto) and the composer's name (e.g. Shostakovich), but there is nothing to tell you that it belongs to his 7th Symphony, the Leningrad Symphony.

Including the work title at the start of every track title is totally impractical for length reasons, so I have a custom metadata tag called 'Work'. Sometimes the work title is visible on the album cover, but that is often not the case, so my Work tag is vital. In addition to wanting access to my Work tag, it's not easy to compare different recordings of the same piece if you can't see the Artist tag. It's not even obvious if I have selected the DSF or FLAC versions of a given work unless you can view the metadata (and it was this that prompted my post today).

I certainly don't make a habit of looking up the metadata for everything I play, but it's nice to have it available when required. Before I got my NAC-N 272, I was in the habit of using BubbleUPnP to play my music and all stored metadata was always just a tap away on the Playing Now screen.

You don't say what server you are using on the Synology, but MinimServer is hugely flexible and designed for classical music. If you are not already using it, have a look at it. 

Thanks for that David. I had no idea. 

That info is showing through from a linked source rather than embedded in metadata. Maybe a facility to switch Rovi off should be incorporated? I'd certainly use it although I'm not forced to look at it like you are. TBH I think that's tending to objectionable.

To have user configurable info incorporated is something I have long wished for. I keep my music collection up to date and include notes, links and personal observations in my music database.  I have stuff that was gifted to me, bought at concerts, signed by artists, live recordings where I was in the audience, signed programmes of the concert, etc.  Hugely preferable to copied and pasted guff from someone I've never heard of. I suspect this is a wish that will remain just that.

This is what I have, which seems to be what you want. It's Asset, but Minim does the same. 

Hungryhalibut posted:

This is what I have, which seems to be what you want. It's Asset, but Minim does the same. 

I use MinimServer, but I was puzzled as to why you could display more than the two metadata tags that I see, so I started poking around for things to press and found an icon on the top left of the Playing Now screen. That switches between two views. The one I had been using shows all the selected tracks beside the album cover, with Track Title and Composer.

The other view is like your sample and shows the currently playing track, plus Composer, Work (via tag substitution driven by MinimServer), Track Title and type of recording.  

Essentially, that solves my problem, so many thanks for highlighting an option I had forgotten was available!

Hurrah!

Harry posted:

ChrisSU posted:

Harry posted:

There is a solution. Don't use Rovi. It's useless. A wall to wall load of shit which Naim should have dropped years ago.

I wouldn't agree with this - at its best, Rovi can contain a lot of useful information. The quality can be a bit variable, and it does occasionally mis-identify the album, but it's not that bad. If you want to see album info done badly - or not at all - try Tidal.

Yes. I'm being somewhat slap stick in my criticism. However, if they can't get it right all the time why do they bother? I think it must be someone's vanity project. If it's 70% correct (which I would say is a generous estimate) why would you waste your life wading  in what might be the 30% of rubbish in the system. 

I wish Naim would provide a bolt-on for custom user information. Maybe just open up the tag display facility (which goes back more towards the OP). There's a load of personal and public domain material out there which is verified and of high quality. I'd love to incorporate stuff like this into my database, as opposed to someone's efforts, copy and pasting results, and opinion. My reminiscences, concert reviews,photos, etc.  Just for me. Why would I want the Naim app to give me someone elses opinion and secondhand accounts?

I have just tried checking Rovi's matches with about 10 randomly selected CDs. Only one match was right first time, Two others provided a match further down the list of results. All the other so-called matches were wrong. Perhaps the hit rate is better for other musical genres, but for classical it's just an irritating waste of time (e.g. Charles Ives matched to Burl Ives).

All the personal data you mention could easily be added to metadata tags and if the single-handed author of BubbleUPnP can provide a popup screen for additional metadata, then it can't be too difficult for Naim. However, my biggest problem has been solved by HungryHalibut, so it's not as critical an omission as I first feared.

Yeah. Good result that.

Nevertheless, I find that all the really absurd or unhelpful suggestions as to what album info/artwork is relevant to the CD I am ripping in my Core may be, come from Rovi, especially that in the case of classical albums the Rovi assumption that you must be ripping a CD from the latest collection/celebration of anniversary or whatever and hence want exactly the same artwork and album title as it offers for each and every one of those 20 or so albums (that you may or may not own).

AMG in the Unitiserve metadata/artwork lookup wasn't perfect, but it was much better than Rovi in the Core. MusicBrainnz is a better source than Rovi but you have to use the Core metadata editor to access it unless Rovi wasn't able to think of anything daft to suggest. Personally I'm not interested in what the app/Rovi has to say about what I am listening to, so fortunately the reported deficiencies in that respect don't bother me.

Best

David

Rovi seems to think any new album it comes across is the greatest hits album of whoever the artist might be. If you then select "not this album" you will get a long list of greatest hits albums by every artist under the sun. 

Strange, again this is not my experience at all. I find that an incorrectly identified album is quite unusual when opening the Rovi booklet. I guess this must be genre dependent, as I don't have many classical albums. I suspect the way Rovi searches by album title doesn't help.

In terms of identifying cover art for my collection, I'd put Rovi's accuracy at a bit less than 50%. Equally frustrating is an inability to manually select the correct cover - although, why be an unpaid developer and validator for the enrichment of someone else's pension plan?

I haven't yet found a HiRes download, DVD-A rip, Blu-Ray audio rip or Japanese import CD that Rovi can identify. So what good is it? It's not all that clever if it can only identify what everybody and their dog knows already, is it? Not that it does that with  total accuracy either.

ChrisSU posted:

Strange, again this is not my experience at all. I find that an incorrectly identified album is quite unusual when opening the Rovi booklet. I guess this must be genre dependent, as I don't have many classical albums. I suspect the way Rovi searches by album title doesn't help.

It's not really strange. Classical music generates a far more complex challenge than pop/rock, etc, for a search tool like Rovi.

Artist and Album is about all you need to nail a non-classical recording. In contrast, just think how many different recordings have been made, say, of Beethoven's Eroica Symphony over the past 50 years. Many orchestras will also re-record works after a few years have passed. Record companies will then reissue all these recordings in combination with a variety of other works. 

Companies like Rovi are out of their depth with classical music. If they can't be bothered to find out how to do it properly, it would be better that they didn't do it at all!