Ripping SACDs to stream through Kodi - advice needed!

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SMS

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I am looking for some advice on how to best rip SACDs to stream over kodi.

I am able to rip the SACDs using my Oppo BDP-103. I have the choice if ISO format, single DFF+cue, multiple DFF, or DSF files.

I have tried playing these files using Kodi, with mixed results:
  • DSF files play, but not gapless, and there is often a loud annoying crackle between tracks
  • A single DFF file, with cue sheet, works pretty well, but skipping tracks seems to take 30 seconds or more and sometimes it seems to hang the Kodi box. Obviously, this is not very convenient if you want to skip a track or two.
I thought perhaps converting to FLAC would be the way to go, but I haven't had much luck getting foobar to reliably convert these files. I have installed the SACD plugin. I have mostly tried converting the DFF+cue format to individual FLAC files. In many cases I end up with one track of nearly 0 size. I'm not sure why. Then, I thought I would try to convert to a single FLAC file with a cue sheet, because I know that works well in Kodi. But.... I can't get foobar to convert the single DFF to a single FLAC. As soon as I drag the DFF file into foorbar, it splits into multiple tracks.

Before I struggle too much longer, I thought I would ask for some advice from you experts :) . What formats do you use to rip the SACD? What format do you use to play over Kodi? Do you convert to FLAC, and if so, how?

Thanks!
 
I also tried getting Kodi to play SACD with the following results:

DSF - I got the same result you got. Not gapless, loud noise. I gave up on .DSF due to these reasons.
DFF - I tried ripping to separate .DFF tracks. I could only play them by selecting individual files. DFF does not accommodate tags, so they could not be scanned into the Kodi library. This was an issue for me as well and gave up on .DFF playback.
ISO - as far as I know Kodi will not recognize these at all.

I ended up converting the .DFF files to FLAC using Foobar. I do split them into separate tracks. They convert to 24/88.2, they play gapless and with no noise between tracks. My routine is to extract the raw ISO using the Sonare GUI. Then I extract the multichannel and stereo .DFF's from the ISO, again using Sonare. I tag all the resulting files. In the tags I call the multichannel album "TITLE" (5.1) and the stereo album "TITLE" (2.0). This way they can be chosen separately on playback. If you don't do this, both the 5.1 and 2.0 tracks will blend together in the same album in the Kodi library.

I save the ISO files to the NAS in case I ever switch to a different media player that can play ISOs directly. I believe JRiver and Foobar can both do that.

I cannot detect a difference in sound quality between the original SACD and the 24/88.2 FLAC conversions. YMMV.
 
Thanks. I was using "DSDIFF Edit Master" and it resulted in a single DFF file per album, along with a cue file. It works in Kodi (tags stored in cue file) except for the very slow track skipping.

I'll try your method and report back. Thanks again!
 
I also tried getting Kodi to play SACD with the following results:

I tag all the resulting files. In the tags I call the multichannel album "TITLE" (5.1) and the stereo album "TITLE" (2.0). This way they can be chosen separately on playback. If you don't do this, both the 5.1 and 2.0 tracks will blend together in the same album in the Kodi library.

Just curious. Are you using MusicBrainz tags? Is that even possible?

Thanks,
PK
 
For SACD I’ve always ripped to ISO (and keep a copy for future).

I use Foobar to convert the ISO to FLAC (individual files per song), Foobar transfers the SACD tags.

Foobar can also retag with MusicBrainz using a MusicBrainz addon, and I use Tagscanner to to add album art and additional info.
 
Kodi uses MusicBrainz IDs to uniquely identify artists. It’s not overly critical but for some add ons such as ArtistSlideShow it is used to ensure the correct photos are shown where artist name are the same or very similar.
 
Some music features in Kodi also use an artist image, fanart and artist logos. A program called MediaElch can semi auto download those. These images appear during menu navigation and song playback.

BTW: Music Media Helper (here on QQ) can tag FLAC audio with MusicBrainz for most albums regardless or whether it’s SACD, DVDA anr BDA. It also can create tagged FLAC from MKV (ripped BDA)
 
Some music features in Kodi also use an artist image, fanart and artist logos. A program called MediaElch can semi auto download those. These images appear during menu navigation and song playback.

BTW: Music Media Helper (here on QQ) can tag FLAC audio with MusicBrainz for most albums regardless or whether it’s SACD, DVDA anr BDA. It also can create tagged FLAC from MKV (ripped BDA)

I use MediaElch as well. It gets about 90% if it correct. The remaining 10% I just do manually.
 
I use Tagscanner to tag everything. What advantage do MusicBrainz tags provide relative to what Tagscanner provides?
I'm under the impression that MusicBrainz tags are the end all be all when it comes to tagging so I was curious as to whether or not MB would differentiate between a 5.1 title and a 2.0 title of the same album...I've never used Tagscanner so I can't speak to that...My HTPC project is slowly moving along so I will find out soon enough :)
 
Slightly off-topic, sorry, but note that Plex won't read tags from DSF files, but emby will ;). Both plays them flawlessly (transcoding to whatever your client can play, Opus in Plex case, do not know what emby transcodes to, AAC I think).
 
What it looks like in Plex:
1536435848955.png


Same DSD in emby:
1536435903640.png


Please note that this is not a SACD rip, but store-bought DSD files.
 
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Thanks to everyone for the advice.

I experimented a bit more over the weekend. I have found that I can use Sonore to rip into DSF format, and then use foobar to convert to FLAC. This worked quite well, and played gapless in Kodi.

This morning, I tried ripping to ISO using Sonore, and then converting to 5.1 FLAC in foobar. This seemed to work OK too. It plays fine in Kodi. However, the files all shows up in Yatse (Kodi controller for Android) as 00:00 minutes. See these screen shots.

d-DVZH6iLIEbgQ7mDehS_SAi0tsMQxZJc_Qc38skeZh5uW-4v4I8lEr5IdMjTsgqC66spFAQ7VNtqPP61C0G2K3uWEdopv7phrRbcQvN9VFZDS3rQhy1KacfzkmVbQtNUy4aSHWe_7KtJucgmPS3kgGyQwZtSCaWKEkUtO8dFEluM7ZspQCnGIAIbr1kwoWnKDqs-7NuyzUDuPsXyttnl3COh6Q3MEzk9tQOpiXw4VpZSpiNGK6HaTfuPlFvENkRsHxH9Sd0zPLbckV59zZKywIDpAOsz7Dt8Mny1yQHCJac6pM8-vXzTn-JO80OrfpF35qS9-ztgczKwkP-N0KjWNv9GX2smkoC5ywdhUIVf8Ff38WKPXbTBvH3hkXv09UquNpduqtN77B4A0wnPlb-DcoPgC5cD68wdCY8MmzOFAKX7xPO7bnl8FI1MD82X8UYq3vrLCP2sV8qdubc4ImvKqMmBpaQHwJEo_inOlWJ7yf5BK8jGJHS1oTCmlNDathNrRnmIjq-JAtCpHh3hjSwgKqHhMTo3AaGSSvETXFvw0-MinpCQgw8iXepIC_YiF_ILLruw7JJeb6tWER7UWj68Vqvj_1WpDOQ4oLMglzh7OptNxPTKJN-3rtEvOnDfSc=w519-h921-no

KxWcxSfy021chs4oeq0pjZ1Ly1SgPUMLGASeGxUYXfnG-nKrT18Eq5Kxjpn7LgetM6RgWABq12t1DrUOnZLi99NhLEIEPyQYbzOwakzKRGW8b96_-5ya-B2bTrIfSFUusA4O34eYmpVTMNFu-muvWZTRiTH5A-DpOk-1YU8DcrAdkLEtjSp-LHYDANBZvyREleUsnUXow9lk4AdpCxj_GzYIkSFb5l_A_1ws0-nXXo5yYMQn3K6yBIFGsGhuRaJGMsQ5OAJ6pAKXwd_iS-gAPuXoImBrVJ451hgt6CAiJBZOmaqXR__hYJPHzJOHfQpC58YdpwCjhofGgoB67IqiWFhL4-SKTjFpzmpGOiFmvEyDLjyZkhdDSu3hMPjodJMogxdR0PHn-cop6HX1s3NzIr1Q96G817IjJvInH9c3ee0BL3H51t1EsLJNV6w52MVzam_byl9CpyV7BLvK2Nhcp2VpFr9UbmScvbYfX3CBHRmyDJkN3ggCTUtYQ8AdsthsSbpa3n4iv-cbnvn8jsrVhLqVH-8yo3nxyINCoc1ZaiokI2yXqH6O7fCsaUzgCUZr-ZDqmwQ1X3mNrHVhvYPuU2oHiw9nerdX4GMmcLQopGuNgqOcB2Es_bFbTb44uTU=w519-h921-no


Any idea why this is happening? If I rip to DSF, then convert to FLAC via foobar, this doesn't happen.
 
OK. After much hair pulling, I found that the problem with duration being 00:00 after conversion to FLAC was caused by foobar. I think foobar worked at first, but then I updated it (and all of it's add-ons) and then it created this 00:00 duration problem. Can someone else try a conversion with the latest foobar version? Kodi, foobar itself, and VLC all see a 00:00 duration for these FLAC files, so it is definitely a problem in the file itself. It plays OK, but the GUIs all get confused.

I downloaded and installed dbpoweramp, and used it to convert from DSF to FLAC, and that appears to be working well.

Does anyone else use dBpoweramp for conversion to FLAC? It defaults to (and recommends) 96k when converting from DSD, while foobar seemed to default to 88.2k. I always thought the math worked out better converting to 88.2k from DSD. Any idea why dBpoweramp recommends 96k? Does it matter? What does everyone else use?

Thanks!
 
BTW... it wasn't only ISO to FLAC in foobar that has the 00:00 duration issue as I stated 2 posts back. Even DSF to FLAC has the problem if converted by foobar. It is just that I updated foobar in between those conversions which confused me. Sometimes updating software creates more problems ....
 
Thanks GOS. It must be something in my settings. Here are my "SACD" settings:

1536853604592.png


How do your settings compare?

And when I convert I use these settings:

1536853677158.png


Pretty simple. I tried not transferring tags, and that made no difference.

It's baffling....
 
Are you using the last east version of FLAC.exe (The FLAC conversion exececutible). Check on the Foobar2000 website.
 
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