n-Serve 17+

Embarassing (like an home made software, but an EXPENSIVE one)

This is like an home made software by your neighbor’s son.
The only difference: you paid A LOT for the package.

For example:
•It doesn’t manage compilations. So you need to rewrite everything, using something like ‘Various Artists’ as artist and put the artist name on the track field, like ‘artist - song title’. You’ve been warned.
•You can’t edit files you didn’t rip with it. When you add your own files, you need to edit them on another software. Like changing genre or correcting a song title or anything. You’ll see by yourself how unfriendly that is.
•It doesn’t work with ANY charactehr other than 1-0 / a-z!!! Good luck if you listen to world music (which i do and it’s a MAJOR pain in the ass). Or even if a song title has a ‘?’ in it. How laughable is that? C’mon Naim developers, you should have known better.
•Cover view - which is probably the best of the three views - doesn’t work (i’m on an MacBook updated to the latest software, but it never worked on any other OS i used it with since i bought the Naim UnitiServe).
•It doesn’t remeber your settings! So every time you start it you need to set your preferences again (like if you want to see covers, if you want list view or another view…).
•You rip your entire collection and only then you happen to find out a lot of random tracks from around your collection weren’t ripped. Wich i understand can happen. But you get NO ERROR MESSAGES at any time during the process (i had to go through my entire collection again and manually check all CDs to see if any track was missing, which actually was the case, that happened in 2016, not in 1996).
•It looses connection with the UnitiServe quite often and you need to quit it and start it again.
•Usability is that of a 90’s software. Subjective point, but I think it’s hard not to agree with that when you use it.

I wrote to Naim to point out some of those issues and they answerd (so i can’t really blame their support) like if they were actually working on some sort of update to the software (something like ‘these were forwarded to our developers and added to the queue’), but guess what? Two years later and the latest version is still from 2015.
In the meantime the new Naim App came out, so i don’t think they’ll ever do nothing with this old crap of software which is the n-Serve app…

I’m just curious, did they solve all those isses on the new app? (which, by the way, isn’t compatible with the old gear, of course)

Really AWFUL experience from an expensive piece of gear/software like this.