I wonder if someone smarter than me can help me smooth out a few wrinkles in my digital music set up, in particular the way I am using Audirvana. For some years I've been using Squeezebox and Logitech Music Server to pump some pretty nice sounds out of my old hifi setup. A while back I invested in an Innuos Zen NAS box to store my growing collection of lossless and ripped CDs (now up to about 30k tracks) and I can control playback on there with LMS just fine. However, not everyone appreciates my love of Albert Ayler or Miles Davis' "lost years" albums, so I invested in a pair of decent headphones, a USB DAC and Audirvana+ so I can listen to the same music via my iMac upstairs. Both the ZEN and the iMac are connected to wifi and Ethernet yet even so syncing the library is a real pain.
Transferring new files to the Zen, not unreasonably given their size, can take a few minutes but I don't get why small changes to track or album metadata can take just as long to sync. And now (after the last update) the Library Preferences panel began showing that the Zen music folder is [OFFLINE] and the Sync button is disabled. My Finder assures me that the Zen is connected and I can still play the tracks that show in Audirvana. Over the last two nights (it took that long) I first deleted and then re-added the music folder to A+ prefs which seemed to restore things but now the OFFLINE message has reappeared.
In addition I'm finding that some albums that show and play correctly in LMS, find themselves scattered to the four winds as separate tracks in A+.
So a few specific questions:
Am I expecting too much from Audirvana running on a network drive? I realise this is something of a specialist piece of audiophile software and although my set up sounds nice enough to my ears I wonder if it's overkill in this situation. Is there a simpler app for streaming from the Zen on my iMac that would recognise the DAC and headphones?
Audirvana's manual says that syncing should be automatic. Does using a NAS break that?
What's the failsafe way for encoding metadata that would keep LMS and A+ reliably happy? Right now I use XLD to rip FLACs and tick the box to preserve metadata. I use Yate to fix albums that show up wrong or are missing tags and then re-save. It doesn't always work.
When I split FLAC and Cue files into separate tracks, should I keep the cue sheet in the folder, dump it or does it make no difference?
Is there a failsafe way of storing cover art so that it shows? In LMS I believe the secret is to call it cover.jpg and place it in the root folder, but A+ doesn't always pick it up.
I can probably come up with more dumb questions, but I'd be so grateful to anyone who has the patience to deal with any of the above. Thx
