Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Systems Ripping Software

Actually I haven't compared the HDCD 24 bit FLAC to non HDCD. I just don't want to have to change back an forth just for my HDCD's. All my other albums sound best streaming PCM.

@Ron,
You only have to process the few HDCDs you have, not your entire collection. That can not be so much work?

Ron's issue is he does not want to disable sending "WAV" to squeezebox in order to play them. Because he likes how WAV sounds over FLAC (independent of HDCD).

My suggestion is to encode the HDCD ones in another native format that supports 24 bit then he can have both.

That is how I would handle using your upsampling/apodizing/resampler tool to keep bitstream DD/DTS files from being processed. But I need way more horsepower in my server to handle your processing tool first .

I downloaded WMA lossless selected 2 channel 24 bit and ran the HDCD DSP during the rip. I'll try it tomorrow. The Apple Lossless codec for dBpoweramp is only good for 16 bit so I didn't bother with that one.

Ron

I don't think apple lossless is native on squeezebox anyway.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squeezebox_(network_music_player)

So is it only 88.2k and 96k sampling that require FLAC sent via sox downsampled to the Squeezebox or can any of the 24 bit high sample rate codecs use sox over to the squeezebox? With HDCD I don't need sox because sample rate is still 44.1k. So I should be able to encode my HDCD's to WMA lossless and still have 24 bit, 44.1k and enjoy PCM streaming with all my FLAC files.

I encoded one of my HDCD's to 16 bit without the HDCD DSP to compare both 16 bit PCM and 24 bit HDCD converted and sent via WMA native. This should be interesting. It was too late last night to update my files and have a listen.

There are more ways to do this. Personally I have added mime types for AC3 and DTS, and made a small commandline tool that encodes those into wave on the fly. Works like a charm ...

What do you mean by "sox". You referring to the automatic downsampling by squeezecenter? I'm not sure how that would fit into this.

Be aware that HDCD is dynamically applied. That is, it may not enhance every song or even every part of a song. It's a moving dynamic range adjustment.

Yes! But I am talking about 24bit/88.2k and 24bit/96k files not 24/44.1k and in this HDCD case native should be fine for 24bit/44.1k. You don't need sox with your transporter. That's my next experiment. Playing a 24bit/96k file to see what it sounds like downsampled by sox.

If you send raw WAV to squeezebox with 24 bit from any source (native, downsampled, upsampled or decoded (HDCD)) it will not work.

But as you are trying with WMA/HDCD you can set a different rule to not convert to WAV for that format.

Any downsampled file will probably get reencoded to FLAC by default.

Note: you can reencode with no compression. Which is what some conversions do. There is not much sense in spending mips to compress and then decompress something that's going to be thrown away in a few minutes.

What compression level have you been using on FLAC from dBpoweramp?

I used the default of 5. You had said once to use the default. All are lossless.

I was hoping you may have used higher which would explain the difference you are hearing. I'm stumped.