Alpina_Lux

I fully second that. I have tagged my entire classical music collection (about 6000 CDs) with this software and it works marvelous - all composers, works and artists tagged and individually searchable over the entire database just makes it perfectly accessible. It's a huge work to do, of course, in particular with large collections; but totally worth it. I don't listen to it at the computer as most here seem to do, but through my stereo in the living room. Access the Synology-NAS stored collection through the Lumin app on my ipad - very simple and intuitive.

This service here offers to rip SACDs - don't know about Blu Rays, but you could ask them: SACD DSD Audio Extraction - Golden Ear Digital

I second that. I have had the D1 only since about 2 months and am very happy with it. The sound quality is extraordinary, and together with the app the user friendliness is outstanding. I'm also thrilled that I can now enjoy gapless playback on all my about 5.500 CDs...!

I fully second that. I have had quite a few correspondences with him about composer tagging and always received a very helpful reply within short.

Well, the key for being able to use a large collection of (classical) music is to tag it consistently. This will then enable you to access and browse this collection easily, for example by looking up a certain work by a specific composer, or recordings by a certain artist etc. This assumes that the relevant tags - composer, composition, artist and/or orchestra, conductor, label and so on are always tagged in the same manner. This obviously takes quite a bit of time, as you will need to go through your collection with a good tagging program and attribute or correct the tags by which you would like to browse your collection later. In my opinion it is very well invested time, though! It is really fantastic once this is done to be able to, for example, look up all recordings of the Waldstein sonata or the Goldberg variations, or all Debussy recordings by Zoltan Kocsis with a few movements of your finger on the relevant app. I have found the MusiCHI tagger to be of great help in this tagging process. There are also other programs that can be bought bundled together (such as the MusiCHI player or the library), but I have only used the tagger extensively so can only speak for this program. It shortens the time to tag large collections because it has its own database of composer and composition names, and you can select these tags and attribute them to your albums very quickly. This database ensures that you always use the same writing in the tags, and that you don't need to write so much when tagging as there is a function that can guess the works and composers based on its own database. For example if you want to attribute the tag "Sonata no. 2 op. 35 "Funeral March" to four tracks in a given album, you will first have to tag these (or more tracks on the same album) with the composer name (Chopin), then you choose these four tracks, type "35" or "funeral" in the composition tag and MusiCHI will automatically suggest the above complete denomination. Of course it doesn't always work perfectly - although the MusiCHI database is very complete as far as composers go (the relevan tag always contains their full name and birthday / date of death), the database for their compositions has some gaps in particular with less popular composers. However, almost the totality of the works of all "main" composers (Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Rachmaninov, Liszt, Schumann, Verdi...to name just a few, there are lots of others) are in the database and can therefor be tagged very efficiently. It is also updated and extended regularly, in the past 12 months I have received about half a dozen updates for it. To give you an idea of what is possible: My collection on the NAS is now at about 5.000 CDs, divided in about 4.500 albums. It took me approximately a year to rip and tag this entire collection using MusiCHI. Of course it took a lot of time and discipline, but less than I had anticipated - I also have a very demanding job so I had to do it on the side. My listening setup has also changed a bit in the meantime: I now exclusively use the Lumin app on my iPad - the app is now quite stable and has the advantage of being more intuitive than Kinsky and - the most useful element for a large collection - to load the entire data onto the iPad so that the browsing is much faster than with Kinsky. I have recently acquired a Lumin streamer (D1) and it works marvellously with its app and the MinimServer. In my personal opinion and based on the considerable work I have invested into tagging my classical music collection, if your intention is to digitise your collection and access it from a NAS (which I believe is the only way to efficiently access a large collection in any event), the MusiCHI tagger is an invaluable time saver.

Just updated to 5.0.1 as well, and now it works again. That's good. Would've been better if it worked with the previous versions as well and you don't have to update things all the time...

For me the A-Z bar on the right of the Lumin app screen does not work any more since I installed the new version 5.0 - I can still jump by scrolling down the bar on the right of the A-Z bar, but unfortunately not to a specific letter, which is somewhat annoying.

I do not think that it's a problem if you reply to questions from those who have bought MusiCHI in this dedicated thread. There are precedents for this in other threads where developers have answered questions of users (or potential users). I even think that this would be very useful here, and your involvement in particular. After all, this is one of the advantages of forums like this and (for me) one of the reasons for their existence - sharing knowledge and solving or at least indicating problems that exist with certain products. But I let one of the administrators take position on this matter.

Hi Larry, sorry for not replying sooner, I haven't been on here for a while due to other things that have taken up my time. The tags written by the tagger - at least all those that are IMO important from a classical music perspective (e.g. composer, composition, genre, conductor) are in my experience readable by any music player. Of course that also depends to a large extent on your music server; I'm using MinimServer in combination with the Lumin or Kinsky app and a Pioneer streamer as renderer and it works without any flaws. All tags that I've used are indexed by MinimServer (of course you need to configure that properly) and I can read them out on the Lumin app. If there are some tags that your player cannot read, the problem may lie with the music server / player rather than with the tags themselves. Also note that the denomination of some tags under MusiCHI does not correspond to the Ogg Vorbis standard, i.e. some tags that have one name in the MusiCHI tagger are displayed under a different name by a music server; I experienced this with the 'label' tag that MinimServer sees as 'organisation'. FWIW, I've now tagged in excess of 2700 CDs / downloads with the MusiChi tagger and it continues to impress me. Works really well.

I'm using both Kinsky and the Lumin app as control points, with a preference to the latter as you can configure the screen better and restart MinimServer directly from the app. I do not know however whether you can use Foobar as a renderer with this configuration. Best is to ask that question directly to Simon (the developer) in the MinimServer forum. MinimServer Forum

Thanks a lot, that is useful to know. I read that the casing is smaller with the T1, but have some doubts that this would result in significant / audible sound differences (at least without truly high-end listening equipment which I do not have anyway).

After some digging, it seems the T1 is being sold for around 3.800 EUR. I would still like to receive some feedback about its audio qualities, in particular compared to its more expensive brethrens.

That is excellent news. I own a few of their SACDs (Hamelin's Shostakovich concertos for example) but cannot currently transfer them to the computer due to lack of the necessary ripping equipment. Good to know some of them will be available as downloads. In general, I like Hyperion's website a lot - not only do they offer lots of their new recordings in high-res audio, but you can also download all booklets of their CDs for free, irrespectively of whether you bought them from their website or not. That is an exemplary service and very useful in particular for those who already own the CDs but do not want to scan them individually when digitising the CDs.

I would also like to know that. And does anyone have an idea on the price of the T1?

I second that. Not only is it beautifully recorded, the playing on it is also first-rate. Other recommendations from my part: - Benjamin Grosvenor / Dances (90 minutes album) - Igor Levit / Bach Partitas (2CDs album) I bought both as a Hi-Res download from Qobuz .