What format to rip into?

Steinar,

if you really don't want to go down the Naim server route but want best possible quality then I would strongly recommend you look to rip into WAV using something like DBpoweramp.  This will provide good metadata and album art.  DBpoweramps own upnp server is called Asset.  I have found it's one of the best, although it needs to run on windows, so more basic NAS drives won't run it alone (you'd need to have it running on a network attached netbook or computer, although you can still hold your music files on the NAS).  It replays the dbpoweramp WAV rips very nicely (as you might expect), handles pretty much any file you throw at it including files I have ripped to ALAC for itunes, and also gets metadata and album art spot on with the Naim N-serve app - most fall down on the latter.

Have you considered a RipNAS?

Or AssetNAS, if you want to rip with your Mac?

Hi Stover -

If your plan is to use UPnP for playback, then I recommend you rip to FLAC (level 0 - minimal compression, or if using dbpoweramp, there is also a new "lossless" FLAC option).

Then, configure Asset (or whichever UPnP server you choose) to convert to WAV on-the-fly while streaming.

IME, this has been the best of both worlds:  the ease of tag management with FLAC on the server, and the best sound quality (lowest processing requirements) of WAV on the player/renderer.

Good luck!

Hook

PS - I did a test between streaming native WAV versus having Asset convert FLAC-to-WAV on the fly, and could not hear a difference (nor could Mrs. Hook in a quick blind test).   Would be interesting to hear from others if they have conducted similar tests and can confirm my opinions.

I see you don't like links Richard

Shouldn't that read "Last edited by Richard Dane" rather than "by Today"?

Oh well, must be Hoop.less working their magic

Nope. Forum Rules. Don't like commercial links at all in the Hifi Corner, and only allow a few here in the Streaming Audio Room.

Yup, something screwy methinks...

Richard, great to see you recommending 3rd party products like dBpoweramp. I realise it's tricky for Naim to be seen to recommend or endorse other vendors' stuff, but do you not think it would be helpful to have a small area of this site along the lines of "Recommended settings for dBpoweramp" that would help your customers get up and running easily, in a way that allowed them to make the best of Naim streamers and DACs, and that put them in a good place should they eventually buy a UnitiServe or whatever?

I think that Naim would only really be able to endorse their own server solution, while acknowledging that other servers may or may not work well with their streamers.

As I'm no longer a direct employee of Naim, I can take a more independent position and post my own opinion and recommendations, which may or may not be officially endorsed by Naim.

The nice thing about DBpoweramp and Asset, I find is that everything pretty much works straight out of the blocks with the NDX and n-stream, with little need to fiddle about barring the initial decision of what format to rip to.  As for me, that decision was easy.  I have compared lossless codecs against WAV and I could hear a difference that favoured the latter.  I know Naim chose WAV for similar reasons and that's good enough for me to know I wasn't imagining things.  Now, whether I could hear a difference between Asset transcoding from FLAC to WAV before streaming against pure WAV, I don't know.  But at least it's one less variable to worry about.

For the record, all FLACs are true lossless files. FLAC "levels" correspond only to encoding speed and resultant file size. Level 0 is fastest and 8 is smallest file size. The final decoded audio produced will be the same for FLACs encoded at any level and the differences in decoding speed are negligible.

Since the final files are only marginally smaller, I use the default of level 5 for all encoding.

Hook - I am not really sure I can hear a difference between transcoded FLAC to WAV using Asset and WAV direct. However I do expand all my FLACs to WAV on the NAS and then stream WAV directly - including the Hidef files which can get rather large..., call me supersticious

Simon

Ok you all. Thanks.

Some interesting, but also confusing posts to me, "dummy".

It seems that there are many approaches to rip music files, and no easy answers here either.

Anyway, I will order a Nas and take a look at how ripping to WAV will work out, using DB poweramp. 

I`m not familiar with terms such as upnp and I struggle by understanding how it all work together, beetween the NAS and the streamer, whether it is a streamer or a computer, controlled by iPad and apps. A friend of mine promised to shed light on this for me.

My Mac Mini was meant to play music and so it does, but I must admit I`m not familiar with Mac (for other tasks).

As an example this evening I tried to rip one particular cd, using iTunes. No matter what format used, lossless, AIFF or WAV, the album size was showed as 260MB. When checking format it was showed as MPEG 4 and "Kodeker" Lossless every time. As far as I understand there was no difference at all technically.

For such reasons I will look at Windows based ripping again. My worktool is Windowsbased and that may explain it all. The other obvious resaon are of course what kind of files Naim streamers like to cooperate with.

It may not look so, but you have really been helpful, leading me some small steps ahead.

Steinar

Hi Colinjay -

Sorry for my confusing post!   I meant to say:

"...there is also a new "uncompressed" FLAC option."

and instead I accidentally used the term "lossless".

FYI, I have ripped all of my CD's to FLAC level 0, but if I could do it all over again, I would have used this uncompressed option.  Disk is cheap, and players seem to be potentially sensitive.

Hi Simon -

I'm with you -- it makes no sense to turn off the Asset option for conversion to WAV, even if the difference between it and FLAC is minimal.   The one thing I did not do, however, was compare WAV (or even converting to WAV on-the-fly) to higher compression levels of FLAC (all I tried was level 0).   I wonder if the NDX would show a greater difference in sound quality with WAV versus FLAC level 8...

Hook

Is there really a difference between wav and aiff in terns of SQ?

Consider iTunes and ALAC. Sounds, to my humble ears, quite fine indeed, and, using on occasion, the best of replay even finer than CD replay shy of £15,000. There may be finer things that I have not heard, but iTunes with ALAC is always better then CD up to CDS 3 level where its swings and round abouts. The differences are small and a matter of opinion. Price cannot be ruled out as iTunes is free of charge ...

ATB from George 

None - however my UQ can't play AIFF directly; hoping an update will fix that. Though in moving to a Vortexbox - I'll probably convert my rips to FLAC. I don't like the way WAV files handle Tags so prefer not to use them if I can avoid it. 

Currently I use iTunes OSX and a Sonus ZP90W4S to play AIFF in to my UQ and Naim DAC respectively both sound very good to me. I have tried WAV and FLAC and ALAC and they sounded very good too. Not as good as vinyl on my LP12, but more than acceptable.  

Thanks GF, I have just unpack my new MBP and are considering to start to rip my cd collection in the near future, even if I have no streaming devices at all at the moment.

AIFF would be the logical choice if if a "unzipped", lossless and tag-able format is what I want. Am I correct?

FLAC coding has an innate container for metatags,  WAV doesn't however some rippers have facility for metatagging WAVs eg dBpoweramp

I haven't heard a difference between FLAC and WAV but I found it quicker ripping WAV than FLAC, so it saves processing time when ripping and every time a file is played. Storage is cheap even on my shoestring budget.

Some tips when you are ready to rip and if you do use dBpowerAmp

dBpoweramp has a 21 day free trial with full functionality, so it helps to be organised

1 Sort your CD collection and ensure CD surfaces are clean

2 Do some test rips an ensure tagging works correctly and artwork is linked to tracks.

3 Familiarise yourself with the app in the Ilustrate forums

4 Ensure you select the write tag options in the options menu

5 Start at Z. will save your traversing the directories A to ~

6 Set the cover art at a suitable size, have it ready at the start of the CD. I think if you start ripping without the artwork saved to foler.jpg /cover.jpg the initial tracks ripped before you have artwork saved to folder will not have the artwork linked to them. Maybe it is not a problem if the artwork is in the correct folder further down the line when you have the NAS and nStream etc set up.  It has been a problem with Windows media player 11 though which I am using as a uPnP server ntil I get a NAS and s/w organised. WMP has written over the arwtork of load of albums, with the same artwork Album Art 00000 00000 ..

I'm still very much a learner with streamed audio

What flavour of WAV are they, as they appear to be readable by Windows Media Player, I'd assume then they are some sort of open standard and not proprietary? Are they BWF broadcast wave format?

Oh I've just read the wiki page for wav, so i read it as the 2007 update to the wav file format.  

As a derivative of the Resource Interchange File Format (RIFF), WAV files can be tagged with metadata in the INFO chunk. In addition, WAV files can embed Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP).

Later it reads
Unlike formats like FLAC, WAV files don't usually have information fields, for instance, in the case of a song, title, artist, album, year, etc.^[15]
Doesn;t clarify matters much for those not familiar with file formats , chunks, headers and the like.

Well, as above, I cannot follow all of your comments, but:

ALAC and iTunes as GF suggest, I am already there and my point is to change format to a more future- and Naimfriendly format. As far as I understand currently only WAV and FLAC is supported by all Naim streamers.

I was recommended to try a QNAP NAS and will try out as Richard D suggest, rip WAV to DBP.

As I have experienced by other threads and questions, I have to try out on my own.

Thanks again

S

Steinar, I reckon we'll be seeing further codec support in the near future.  However, even now, Asset streams my ALAC files to the NDX very nicely.  Only issue is the cover-art.  Files where I added cover-art myself are fine, but those where itunes found it automatically don't show.  You have to add a folder.jpg yourself.

For all that, dbpoweramp secure WAV rips sound a bit better to my ears, so there's much to gain by going this route.

There isn;t anything to get one's head round in uPnP. The point in universal plug and play is that in supported devices it's err, universal and plug and play . You plug it in then play. It's all user transparent and needs very little setup.

The rest I don't need to know the above to rip and play my music, I want to know the above because I just do, I'm interested . Furthermore I need the flexibility of custom tagging so that I can add, say  BPM info from the DJ cards in studio albums / maxis, so I can select tracks for mixes in applications other than hi-fi  Ableton, Traktor.., . 

I need to be quite pedantic about how tracks are saved because I need to be able to select an appropriate mix of a track for play in these other apps or if playing out I could clear the floor and look a ****.

I've had to add some track information myself  from Arabesque Dist'n, Psyshop, discogs, beatbort, trackitdown because even the subscription metadata repositories don't always identify the specific remix of some tracks (which may have a vast range of tempo, style and other musicology), I'm not even going into, Jam and Spoon's Stella, New Order's Blue Monday  Energy 52's Cafe Del Mar, Depeche Mode's Enjoy the Silence territory or the numerous Nitzer Ebb and Front 242 remixes .  

That's a metatag service provider data quality issue that will affect people whatever way they rip their music. Not a big deal for regular home listeners but a minor annoyance for DJs, public & private broadcasters

I only had problems with artwork, tags initially because I used the trial version of dBpoweramp and didn't check I had selected the appropriate options before I started ripping. Sure the trial version would have saved everything correctly but  the free use licence subsequently ran out thus disabling tag editing funtionality and I had no way of adding the missing information for all the CDs ripped.

Now I have a paid for licence I have had no problems with the storage and display of artwork, album, artist and full track names[including remix name].

All sorted now after my initial haste to get my money's worth out the free licence.