Useful (Mac) software ancillary to streaming

I had the good fortune of ordering a Uniti Nova in February which gave me plenty of time to work out how I should be ripping and cataloguing my modest classical music CD collection—as well as enabling me to download high resolution music as the time passed until delivery. As I sat listening to glorious music from the Nova this afternoon it occurred to me that some brief comments about software might help others (although most here seem to know what they’re doing!).

Bear in mind these comments come from a Mac user so may not help Windows users.

All ripping was done on the Mac using dBpoweramp. The software is very good at detecting (by reference to a number of on-line databases) the CD you are ripping and completing the metadata and album art appropriately. It was also easy for me to adjust any metadata I wanted to change. Working with dBpoweramp taught me a lot about the importance of good metadata and track numbering.

Following sight of a recommendation on this forum I also bought Metadatics, which has proved really useful taming some of the slightly weirder metadata that sometimes seems to attach to high resolution downloads. It is very easy to use and exceptionally useful if you need, for any reason, to do something like automatically renumbering a sequence of tracks or fixing rogue album art.

As FLACS started to encroach upon mp4s the inadequacies of iTunes became ever more apparent so, after some on-line research, I moved to Swinsian to catalogue my collection of music. It’s not flashy but works perfectly through a simple, clear interface. There’s no need to move your iTunes library as it will read it in place and automatically add new tracks if you set it to watch the relevant folder. You can also easily edit metadata within the app if you need.

My Uniti Nova feeds from a QNAP server, a Mu-so feeds from a USB flash drive and I have an Astell & Kern Kann (an upgrade from an AK Jr) for portable music. All music is stored on my Mac (and, of course, backed up—for which I use both Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner) so when metadata is edited or new tracks added on the Mac there are three destinations for the changes. I finally discovered SyncMate—which allows me to synchronise changes to all three destinations. It has the considerable added advantage that it will mount the A&K Kann (which uses an OS based on Android) and sync with it. That enabled me to dispose of the horribly clunky Android File Transfer app, which I’d previously used when talking to the Kann.

The QNAP server has both MinimServer and Asset—although I much prefer, and use, MinimServer for my music (even if it is much more technical to configure than Asset).

I appreciate there are many other apps available which do similar things (notably, perhaps SongKong and Jaikoz—both of which I use from time to time) but hope these personal notes may help one or two readers. Sorry for the length of this post.

Stephen