I purchased the EverSolo DMP-A8 to replace a Naim UnitiServe SSD mainly because I was tired of the interface that Naim puts out on this server. The DMP-A8 appears to be much more up to date and user friendly but I am having some problems understanding how to use the interface. I will outline my setup and then ask advice on how to resolve my questions. I have the DMP-A8 with a 4TB SSD installed in the bottom. It is connected to my LAN via a CAT-5 cable. It is connected to my Rega DAC via a coaxial cable which is connected to my Jeff Rowland Capri pre-amp going into Jeff Rowland Mono-Block amps playing through Avalon Transcendent speakers. A nice entry level audiophile system. BTW, at some point I will try out the DAC and Pre-amp capability of the A8, just not right now. I installed the SSD as per directions, formatted it and labelled it SSD Music. I have my music loaded on the SSD in either FLAC or WAV format into the EverSoloMusic subdirectory. I copied it over from my NAS to the SSD over the network. That took quite a while. Regarding loading the music on to the SSD I at first loaded it into the Music subdirectory. I am not sure if that was okay so I created a subdirectory called EverSoloMusic (I don't think it was there before) and copied all of the music into that subdirectory. It seems to work in either subdirectory so I then deleted all the music in Music. I have also tried to access music via the Synology NAS and that works also. So the music is sitting on the SSD and I can see the various albums via the Files or the Album selection in the Music selection in the interface. I added them to to the Library by clicking on the +Library button. That took a while. I can see all the albums by Album in the Music screen but I can only see about 10 artists when I select Artist. There are definitely more that 10 artists. I can see all the Albums listed by artist using Files. This is a little bit confusing. BTW, I can also see the tracks via the Tracks selection in the Music screen. According to this app there are 6031 tracks in 501 Albums, if this is to be trusted. Now that I have set out what I have done here is the issue. The main problem I have now is how to I get to see all the albums by Artist in the Music screen? I must be missing an instruction on how set this up but I can't seem to get it to work. I don't know why a few artists show up in the Music screen but most don't. Is there a file imbedded in the folder like the *.jpg that needs to be there for the cover art to show up? I would appreciate guidance on this. Thanks! Mark
Thanks for the reply. Yes they are organized in folders as Artist/Album/Tracks. Attached are two examples. Boney James is one for the few artists I can find under Artist. Dave Matthews is one of the artists not available under Artists.
Looks all OK. I have an A6 and moved a lot of rips done on another system to the SSD. They all had that folder hierarchy and were all recognised correctly in the Library database construction. So not obvious to me why you are having problems. I note that the one example that you gave that worked was m4a format whereas the one that didn't was wav. Are all the working ones m4a, do these different file extensions reflect different ripping programs ?
Good catch! All the ones that I can find under Artist are m4a. They are CDs that the Naim UnitiServe had trouble ripping and stuck them in a separate folder. The CDs the UnitiServe could rip with no problem are WAV files. The one disc I ripped using the A8 software is FLAC. It appears I am having trouble having the software recognize WAV and FLAC files. Any idea how to fix that?
I think both the A6 and A8 by default allow a very large list of formats at least as regards the permitted file extensions. There is a setting somewhere which allows you to remove some file extensions, but this is just to stop some files from being displayed by Files. It is true that the inbuilt ripper mainly deals with FLAC, but the library should not care whether it is wav or flac. The problem may reside instead in how the artist metadata was handled by the UnitiServe when the ripping was done, so the arcane area of tags may be involved. This is beyond my experience, but other forum members may be able to help in investigating the tags or lack of them and potentially how to retag them so the A8 library can recognise them correctly. A possibly mad suggestion would be to start again and rip them all again on the A8 !
I think I have it figured out with your help. Yes, I am pretty sure it is an issue regarding, as you say, the arcane area of tags. I have seen somewhere that WAV files are just music and contain no other information. While pursuing CD ripping videos on YouTube I came across "Easily Rip and Archive Your CDs Losslessly" on macOS by content creator Studio 3B-Audio and Technology. Towards the end of his recommendations for ripping, which is good but I don't need to rip at this time, he discusses using MusicBrainz Picard app which is a cross platform music file tagger to organize the music. I downloaded it, followed the fairly simple directions and used it to "tag" a small portion of the music I have from the UnitiServe in WAV format then added them to the SSD in the A8. I then used the +Add Library function in the EverSolo app to add them to my library and everything is functioning as I wanted it to. I can see by Album, Artist or Track and all the album cover art came with it. A little complicated work flow but much simpler and a lot faster than re-ripping all my CDs. If anyone is wanting to know it I can explain my workflow which I will be using to rework all my WAV or FLAC files to import them into my A8.
Following the recommendation about Musicbrainz Picard by @Shotgun_MGT above, I decided to try this piece of software. Now I am happy enough with my A6 rips and how they play on the A6. However I recently just out of curiosity purchased the new Bluesound Node Nano streamer. Obviously I wanted this new streamer to see my local library of rips, so I connected a USB external SSD to the Nano and allowed it to index its internal library. What I found is that all the rips done for the last year on my A6 now lacked album art and often showed the first track as without a track number. All rips done on an earlier system (Brennan B2) were OK and showed album art and track numbering correctly. Now there is always album art in each music folder but the Nano was not happy with the situation. So I installed Picard on a Win10 laptop to examine the tags metadata on the A6 rips. Basically if I load in a set of tracks ripped on the A6 forming a single CD, they will usually all cluster to a single element as expected. Then using Picard Scan, usually they get recognised correctly to the right album with correct coverart. Simply saving this fully tagged version of the files then results in a version with every track having the album art embedded and the track numbering now going 1 to N rather than 0 to N-1 as the A6 appeared to generate. Now updating the Nano database with this new retagged version results in correct display of the album art and correct numbering of the tracks as seen in the BluOs app. So just to be aware, the current A6 and A8 rips may need to go through something like Picard to fix these issues if you want them to work well with other streamers. The Node Nano by the way sounds fine over coax to my usual external DAC. The only drawback for me is that it only has one USB port which can be either for an external drive or for USB Audio Out but not both at the same time as done by the Eversolo streamers. I hope the upcoming firmware updates can improve on the current ripping situation on the Eversolo streamers.
Wav flies don’t support embedded metadata. If those aren’t working convert to flac. I used DB Poweramp for this. it listened to 200 wav albums and identified 90% accurately. With the rest I had to do some listening and comparing. Took an evening so was worth it for me. If you do buy it make sure you read his setup instructions. Make sure you set everything to no compression so it can sound as good as possible.
