Hi John

I've been following the thread (and others) and I can feel your growing frustration. I think any of us who have bought into Sooloos will agree that a substantial investment demands industry-leading support and real attention to detail. These are indeed the hallmarks of successful high-end retailing in any sector (I used to work in London selling top flight wine - it's a similar market).

My own experience has been that while the system hasn't been quite as niggle-free as I was promised, I have been able to enjoy a pretty stable and reliable system. It sounds like your dealer needs to step up and support you with some of your annoyances. I know that Meridian has expanded their customer service facility in the last 12 months, but that's really set up to support dealers in supporting their customers, rather than dealing with customers directly.

I agree that metadata for classical music is poor, but that's out of M's control. There is no good database of that stuff anywhere to draw on, as far as I know. I also agree that the lack of track level metadata limits how effectively this can be organised - but from my cursory knowledge of databases this is a pretty deep 'structural' issue which would take a major revamp to address. We may have to wait a few years, I think realistically. By that time, the cloud / wiki concept will surely have to be integral too, and I've no doubt that the data we painstakingly enter will indeed be available to others, which will dramatically increase the scope and detail of the information available.

In the meantime, I have created my own 2000x2000 cover scans for over 2000 CDs I have ripped and in general I have had no problem adding them as I tidy up the data after ripping each disc. I have found that the small and large versions don't always match, but usually a simple close and re-start of ControlMac addresses this. Very occassionally I have had to re-boot the entire system, TwinStore, control and all, but then it has found them all and syncronised with no problem.

From a housekeeping point of view, I leave the whole system on all the time but I do a re-boot of the whole lot every week or two, or every few hundred CDs if I have been having a ripping session. Long experience has taught me that all PC-based systems benefit from a chance to clear caches and catch up with themselves every once in a while.

Good luck with it all

Dominic

C10, Source One (broken), 1x TwinStore (2x4TB), various DACs, Musical Fidelity A5 pre/power amps into B&W speakers. F80 in bright shiny red.