NAIM MUSIC SERVER DATABASE Datasheet

www.naimaudio.com

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24

th

 April 2008 

The Naim Hard Disk Player and Music Server Database 

Alan Ainslie 

Naim Audio 

Southampton Road, Salisbury, SP1 2LN, England 

alan.ainslie@naimnet.com 

Abstract 

Music Servers have traditionally stored music in 

association with a database to allow retrieval of music at 

an Album level. While this is in accordance with the 

great majority of commercially available databases it is 

certainly not the manner in which a normal user selects 

music from conventional storage.   

Music Servers, therefore, generally fall far short of the 

requirements of serious listeners of Classical Music, 

Jazz, and Compilation albums. 

A better solution had to be developed before Music 

Servers and Hard Disk players attain ubiquity in the 

market alongside conventional sources such as CD 

players. 

This paper demonstrates how information at Track level 

with Naim Extended Metadata can give a user 

experience beyond the convenience of conventionally 

selecting a CD from the shelf. Powerful database 

processing and search mechanisms deliver an intuitive 

user interface for both the casual user as well as the 

dedicated musicologist, whether playing music from the 

Hard Disc or simply playing a CD album in real-time.  

1. Background 

Traditionally, physical vinyl record and CD collections 

have been stored on shelves with spines visible.  The 

content of the spines reflects the marketing endeavours 

of the record company on the one hand and also serves 

to indicate contents of the single disc or album for 

selection by the user.  Selection of an album quickly 

offers additional information as soon as the album is 

removed from the shelf, as track information is readily 

visible along with other information relating to artists and 

the specific recording. 

In order for a Music Server or Hard Disk Player to match 

or surpass the convenience of selecting discs from a 

collection on a shelf, a database internal to the Server 

has to be constructed to match the ripped disc.  

The only unique identification for the disc relates to the 

properties of the data on the disc: number of tracks, 

track lengths, total play time etc.  Information contained 

on the CD sleeve is not known to the Server. 

The combination of tracks, track times etc. is possibly 

unique, but not always guaranteed to be so.  At the time 

of ripping the Server will interrogate one or several on-

line databases in order to match the disc being ripped 

with a managed and maintained database. The relevant 

database entry is downloaded, and together with Cover  

Art is used to give the user a local database within which 

music can be selected for play. 

2. Current 

Situation 

The shortcomings of the current state of the art of 

cataloguing ripped CDs fall into several categories. 

Virtual music collections where the data representing the 

music is stored, but where there is no physical carrier 

create a new problem for cataloguing.  Initially the 

industry responded with several commercial databases 

offering cataloguing at an ALBUM level: 

ARTIST (SINGLE ARTIST FOR THE ALBUM) 

ALBUM 

GENRE 

And within the selected album simply: 

SONG  

will identify any individual track. 

This is the situation, supported additionally with Cover 

Art that has been used by the various free or subscribed 

databases for a number of years. 

ALBUM LEVEL 

TRACK LEVEL 

 Searchable 

 Searchable 

Artist Y 

Song Y 

Album Y 

Genre Y 

Cover Art 

While this situation will work for simple Albums where 

the Album title is unambiguous and the Artist is the same 

for all tracks, the system immediately fails for 

compilations, where there are many possible artists 

individual to each track in the album.   

Virtually all Classical music is assembled onto an album 

as a compilation, and therefore it is implicit that the 

current situation fails with classical music.  

2.1  International releases may be different  

Albums may well exist in several versions in different 

territories. These may have a different track makeup or 

different Cover Art, even the same tracks but in different 

order, or differing track lengths due to editing 

refinements in later releases. 

2.2 Gapless playback 

Albums may be designed for continuous play.  The 

concept of ‘tracks’ being merely to identify location on 

the physical disc.  E.g. Opera, or Pink Floyd: The Wall.