Ripping music and organising playlists...

I won't try to answer re playlists because I don't use them, so won't know the answers.

But as regards ripping, generally people prefer to rip to FLAC because the rip is smaller than a WAV and metadata handling is more straightforward. You should be able to convert to WAV on the fly on playback and some people reckon the rip sounds better this way as the ND5 or whatever streamer has less work to do if it doesn't have to process the FLAC. But it's relatively subtle and you could see whether you can hear any difference.

if you rip with a Naim server like UnitiCore then it rips to FLAC or WAV depending what you tell it to do in set up, but there is no on the fly conversion. The UnitiCore uses Naim's own way of handling metadata in WAV and it works fine for the most part.

best

David

 As you seem to have no issues with ripping FLAC,  then FLAC is OK.  Personally I can hear a small difference between WAV & FLAC when played straight but no difference when transcoding.   But as I have no issues at all with ripping or editing WAV metadata,  I chose to  use WAV. 

Re transcoding:  As long as you can work out if/how your NAS transcodes  .....  I've not heard of your Lacie 2big NAS so you are a bit on your own with that,  I read the manual on www & it appears to be loaded with media server software but it needs to be enabled,  not sure who's software it is,  maybe proprietary to Lacie/Seagate,  I suspect it might be linked to iTunes,  which I don't like the sound of & I would try to find if it can be loaded with media server software that everyone knows & does transcode such as Asset or Mininserver.

OLIOC Thank you for the topic, with benefit.

As a Mac user, I use iTunes to fix metadata, so FLAC is a no-go; I like AIFF best for maximum compatibility, since storage space is so plentiful and cheap nowadays.

I use XLD for ripping.

Happy.

Nick

In terms of managing and updating album, artist, etc names, I'd suggest you get one of two tools. 

MusicBrainz is a free tagger that will look up your music automatically. Takes a bit of getting used to.

Bliss  Music Manager is not free, but I find it easier to use. Run by Dan, who is a 1 man shop. Haven't needed any help for awhile, but he's super responsive and his email newsletter has great tips. Adds missing cover art, joins split albums, and lets you make genre's consistent with your own custom labels, which I find most helpful.

mutterback posted:

In terms of managing and updating album, artist, etc names, I'd suggest you get one of two tools. 

MusicBrainz is a free tagger that will look up your music automatically. Takes a bit of getting used to.

Bliss  Music Manager is not free, but I find it easier to use. Run by Dan, who is a 1 man shop. Haven't needed any help for awhile, but he's super responsive and his email newsletter has great tips. Adds missing cover art, joins split albums, and lets you make genre's consistent with your own custom labels, which I find most helpful.

While these are sound recommendations, XLD (and others) check in with MusicBrains and FreeDB automatically, speeding the process.

Use iTunes you already have to make repairs.  I find it is seldom necessary.  The extra step I ondulge in is to find an excellent album cover image via Google, save it as Folder.jpg. And add it to the folder, before making it available to the Naim app.

Nick

OliOC posted:

... Ripping, ... Organising playlists ...

Ripping in .flac is perfectly fine. When it comes to organizing your muisc library and playlists, it very much depends on the kind of music you are interested in. If you are interested in classical music, I strongly suggest that you try MinimServer as a UPnP server and read the (excellent) MinimServer documentation. This will help you finding the way to organize your data that best fit your needs. Advice on organizing music collections can also be found on the MinimServer Forum. As a personal advice, I would suggest that you invest some time to fill in a "Work" or "Composition" field. As your music collection grows, you will find it very useful to browse it by Composer > Work > Album. If you are not interested in classical music, forget all above: most UPnP server will do and filling in the standard Album, Artist, Composer, etc. fields is probably enough. Also in this case, however, you should use a UPnP server that supports multiple values for any given index or field. Most will do but some UPnP server really suck.

Thank you all for your help and advice so far. 

I’ve slowly been getting to grips with everything and things seem to be going to plan. DBPoweramp has it’s own built in meta data editor, which although limited, enables me to edit everything I need to. 

My music taste is varied but I don’t have any classical music and very few complications. Hardly any. 

I still have the odd issue where an album is missing art when browsing albums, but when you view the album, all songs seem to have the correct artwork?! This is only on my iPad whereas everything is fine on my iPhone. 

I’ve tried clearing the image cache and that doesn’t help. It’s no big problem - just rather annoying for my OCD!

OliOC posted:

Thank you all for your help and advice so far. 

I’ve slowly been getting to grips with everything and things seem to be going to plan. DBPoweramp has it’s own built in meta data editor, which although limited, enables me to edit everything I need to. 

[snip]

As you are using dbPoweramp you should try using the artist sort, album artist and album artist sort fields. If your server works like Asset does this will make the A-Z button do something:

Let's use David Bowie and The Beatles as examples:

artist=David Bowie; artist sort=Bowie, David; album artist=David Bowie; album artist sort=Bowie, David

artist=The Beatles; artist sort=Beatles, The; album artist=The Beatles; album artist sort=Beatles, The

You'll find that the A-Z button will give David Bowie under "D" and The Beatles under "T". Flipping the A-Z button will put David Bowie under "B" and The Beatles under "B" (they should still show as "David Bowie" and "The Beatles", just under "B" now).

(This will be the artist and artist sort fields. Use the album artist/album artist sort for albums where different performers are listed:  If you have compilation albums for example, set album artist and album artist sort to Various Artists and artist/artist sort to the performer of the track. The album should then appear under Various Artists,  this is also useful for many recent performers of the format "Artist 1 featuring Artist 2" - it'll sort under the album artist (Artist 1) but the track details will show Artist 1 and Artist 2)

I find artwork is only perfect everywhere when I embed the image as metadata for each song at rip-time AND save a folder.jpg to the folder containing an album’s songs.

Doing one or the other gives uneven results, IME.

Nick