Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Streaming Anyone moved from Sonus to Sooloos

Sorry Gerry
Your posts here are most welcome, but in the interests of clarity...........

I've been experimenting and using Sonos from within six weeks of it becoming available in the US in 2005

Sonos has worked happily with iTunes and AAC, MP3 and (in my case) Apple Lossless since Day ONE.

What you're referring to are DRM protected 128kbps AAC Tracks purchased thru Itunes Store. The Music Companies only allowed DRM protected tracks to be sold and Apple, in turn, were not allowed to licence their replay on other Devices like Sonos

Since the Music Companies allowed Apple and others to sell 256kbps AAC Tracks WITHOUT DRM, the Sonos have played those Tracks too

So, in summary, it was not a Sonos issue, but a a typical Music Company roadblock preventing choice for the consumer

dBpoweramp, which also relies on The AMG database returns 500 by 500 pixel Album Art.

It also polls the GD3 and Music Brainz Databases for Tags and Album Art

At HH2, the Sooloos guys claimed that these Databases were also used by them as a fallback to AMG

So, I'm not sure where the 200 by 200 pixel limitation is coming from, but it's not AMG (or the the commonly used Databases)

Sorry I'm confusing you and me with reference to a "search". If you search on Beethoven you do get everything (and more) - what I meant was I like to scroll through my albums (like looking along a shelf) and to do that I use album artist (or folder, which amounts to the same thing in SB world). If I do that on composer, I get out-of-place albums because of the surname/first name ambiguity.

From what I've seen when playing with Demo Sooloos systems, and then adding Gerry's comments above, Compiliation Albums are dealt with in the following way by Sooloos

A) The Artist Name is displayed as "Various Artist"

B) The Artist's Name is tagged onto the Song Title resulting in "Track Name - John Smith" appearing in the Track Title field

C) The AlbumArtist Field in the Sooloos remains at "Various Artist"

From Duncan's comments, it seems to stick to the above even when importing from already correctly tagged Tracks

...and freedb, which sometimes beats the others.

I always get 500x500 art with dBpoweramp. It's sometimes art from a different issue or re-issue of disc versus the one I have but it's never 200x200.

I listen to a lot of dance mixes, and I manually edit the artist names in iTunes to the name of the DJ doing the mix so I don't get thousands and thousands of artists showing up when searching through artists for something, so I guess we are all different.

I have around 500 mix cds, and each one has between 12-20 tracks on it, and around 12-20 artists, so even 12 x 500 would add 6000 artists to my database, not something I would want at all.

On Sonos you have 2 methods of browsing the artists:-

1. Album Artist (so only shows the main artist or Various for a comp CD)
2. Contributing Artist (complete list of every artist of every track)

Guys, just wanting to put this back in to perspective and back to my original post:


I highly recommend the Sooloos solution as a very high quality, slick system which performs flawlessly; The interface is fast and a dream to use. The extended meta data it gathers from AMG is unique as it gives the ability to focus on albums who for example have the same drummer or producer.

My comments about the way it handles 'Album/Track Artist' just means it works differently to what I've been used to previously (does not mean it is wrong, just different) The export works as it should, it`s just for me in my setup I cannot see 'contributing artists' when searching via Sonos, this is a minor thing which I suspect will effect no one else here. (It's even disabled by default in the Sonos menu's - you have to dig through 5 menus to enable it)

Ripping CD's work like a dream - the best I've ever seen and 99.9% of the time the tags are perfect - Personally I prefer to clean up the CD Title as sometimes it shows thing like '[UK Version]' which I have just been deleting. It identifies albums with multiple disks and shows 1of2 and 2of2 etc.

Importing CD's from hard disk again works really well as it gets all of the missing meta data from AMG, so during import all of the producer/drummer etc information is completed the same as you were ripping it form CD on the Sooloos unit. If a CD is not found then it is just imported with the info it gets from the tags in the track (Using track 1 as the artist).
I've worked out it will import the album art if it is stored as a jpg in the same folder as the files. I`ve only seen an issue when importing a multi-CD Album from hard disk; it sometimes gets it wrong. (Fixable but takes a little time but only needs to be done once)
I think it would be good if Meridian produced a flyer on ‘how best to import your existing library` There might be some do`s/don`ts that I missing which is why some of my multi-disk CD`s don`t import very well.

The Default 200x200 album art is a bit of a let-down but not a show stopper as it looks OK, it`s easily replaced via the Control:PC software. May take a little time but as Gerry said it only needs to be done once.

Nobodies Enthusiasm should be dampened as these are minor things for my setup on what is an outstanding piece of kit.

Duncs

Thanks, if I go back to my original post, you are someone who has been through the sonus to Sooloos route as appear to be very happy. Hopefully the contol 15 will be even better so will probably progress with this route sooner then later.

Still unsure as to whether to rerip in Sooloos or import my apple lossless rips with a few holes in the tags etc.

many thanks

David

It sounded like Duncs said it will relookup tag info on AMG when you import and fill in the holes.

I remain very interested in Sooloos but this statement makes me smile: with somewhere over 6000 CDs I am pretty sure I would have to do it somewhere over 6000 times, not just once!

Thanks for this. It's easy to get caught up in a downward spiral and end up thinking it's useless when the opposite is true. The key for me will be to try before buy to make sure that what I would end up with gives me the slick user experience I'd be buying it for in the first place. As you say the 200x200 art is a disappointment, but not too bad if you do the bulk of your initial rip, or all your ripping with, say, dBpoweramp, as that puts 500x500 art in the same folder as the rest of the album.