One of the great features about Bryston's Artist View and the BDP is how it gets
your local music collection with your Tidal collection. If you have a Tidal
account for lossless internet streaming, you can enter your Tidal credentials in
Media Player settings. So that's the sprocket, you know, up in the top right
corner. You click that sprocket, go down to Tidal, enter in your username and
password. You can set sound quality either as high, which is a 320
kilobit per second mp3, or if you own a BDP-3, chances are you want lossless,
so you'll select lossless. Click the Save button once your credentials are entered
and your BDP will have access to Tidal. At that point you can play music
directly out of Tidal or you can use artist view to find missing releases in
Tidal. So here you see I've clicked on Pink Floyd. We have a copy of Dark Side
of the Moon here on the drive. If I want to see what else we're missing by
Pink Floyd, I'll hit Missing Releases, the BDP will query MusicBrainz online and then
find a large number of albums that we don't have on our local drive. Now we can
tell the difference between albums that are stored on our drive or are being
streamed from Tidal by the Tidal logo in the lower right corner of each. To play
one of these you can simply click a track to just play a track or press the
play button to play the album. The tracks will go into your playlist and it
will be indistinguishable from a from a local music playback on your device. You
can even build playlists that include both Tidal tracks as well as local music
tracks from your from your own hard drive. Tidal can also be accessed
through the Default View on the BDP. Once you open Media Player, click on Default
View. You see the list of drives and meta data sorts down the right-hand side.
Close to the bottom you'll find Tidal. If you click on Tidal you have a variety of
playlists. What's New, Rising, Moods - it's all familiar to you if you've
used Tidal's own interface. Any music that is stored
as a favorite will show up under my music and if you want to query Tidal
for a specific artist or album or track, simply click search up in the top and
enter in your query. So if I want to listen to Cass McCombs, I start typing
Cass McCombs at the top. Instantly I see hits under artists. If I type in
an album or if I'm searching for an album I can find any albums that match
my query under that category, playlists and tracks as well. So if I want to
expand any one of these, just simply click the down arrow. I
can pick my chosen search result and add to the playlist to get things going
from there. Bryston offers a product called the BOT-1. The BOT-1 lets you
connect our optical drive to any generation BDP and rip CDs, playback CDs,
or even burn a playlist to a CD-R. The most common application for BOT-1 is
ripping your discs. If you've got a large CD collection and BDP-3 with connected
storage either on a NAS or a local drive, you can use the BOT-1 to rip and
organize that music. To access the ripping application for the BOT-1
from the dashboard, simply click Applications and CD Backup. Once you
click CD Backup you're presented with a user interface that that gives you all
the information that you need to know about the disk that's currently inserted
into the BOT-1. Now before we get to actually ripping this disc, let's do a
quick setup of the BOT-1. By default the BOT-t1 is configured to rip your music
in FLAC. The destination is the first disc it finds, so here we've got a disc
called Untitled here plugged in by USB. If you want to change that destination
we'll use a sub folder. Simply click on the window. You can click on a disc, find
the folder that you want to to use as your
home base for music, and click done when you're satisfied with the results.
You can build a naming structure, how you want your files named on the disk. This
is a typical structure, you can use our default here. We use the album artist
slash name of the album slash track number dot track name. This is a very
common nomenclature. Unless you already have a specific format that you want to
use, using our default is probably the best bet. There's also a separate naming
structure for various artists albums, like original motion picture
soundtracks, compilations, etc. We also store a separate image file in each
album folder. This field is where you title that album image. By default
we use folders so that would generate a folder dot jpg file. You can also use
cover.jpg or front.jpg - Whatever you choose be sure it's consistent with
Media Player settings so that your album art is properly detected by the BDP.
Below that are some advanced options. You can use the built-in RAM in the BDP as a
temporary location to hold the raw wav files before they're encoded into your
chosen file type. If you want to create an mp3 copy, perhaps to put on a separate
drive and plug into your car, you can do that. If you are anxious and want to
speed up the ripping process you can disable the verification process and
advanced tagging. If for some reason you have trouble ripping certain
discs you might try re-running them again with advanced tagging also
disabled. Once you insert a disc into the BOT-1 the BDP recognizes that disc and
searches the internet for metadata that matches that disc. Most of the time this
information is pretty accurate, especially with with major releases by
major artists. If you have discs that are produced by lesser-known artists or are
in small quantities you might not always get the right hit. In that case you
can click on the meta window and find other options that match your disc
to some degree and click on that disc to have meta data repopulated. Any
of these fields can be edited by hand if you notice a misspelling, for instance in
an artist name, you can simply click on the field, rename the artist, any of
these options at the top will apply to every track on the disk. The options
below for individual tracks can also be edited but each one of these edits is
going to apply individually to each track. Last but not least, we want to
capture the correct album art for each disc. You can click on the album art
selector. At the top you see the currently recognized album art. Unless
you make changes this is the art that will be used once the music is tagged.
If it's not quite right or the color is not quite what you're looking for you can
pick one of the other images found on the Internet,
or you can even enter a custom URL from the internet and enter any URL that ends
with jpg or PNG, maybe from a Google image search or some other
image source online, and that art will apply to your ripped tracks. Close the
panel when you're done. Once you're satisfied with the way the metadata
appears you can simply click back up to execute the backup process. You'll hear
your BOT-1 spin up, get an alert in the lower right corner saying initiating CD
backup, and then you can follow the progress of your rip on a track per
track level by taking note of the percentage read from disc as the BOT-1
rips a CD. You'll see the status indicated beside each track. Once the
track is read from the disk a temporary wav file is generated. The wav file is
then encoded into FLAC or your chosen music forma. Once the encoding
process is done on that track you'll see a message that says completed. Once the
the track is completed it's available to playback or to add to a playlist. Once
the disc is done ripping it will automatically be ejected from the BOT-1
and the system will be ready to accept the next disc.