How many of you can play MC flac files directly?

[TVB]

A great big thanks to HOMER giving me the heads up on mkv and media music helper software. I am in the process of converting all of my multichannel surround blurays to multichannel 96/24 flac files. Why? because my OPPO 95 is the only bluray player I have with multichannel analogue outputs (rca jacks) and getting another analogue out player seems to be very unlikely (my mission to obtain an Oppo 205 came up fruitless)....and.....this is my much preferred method of listening to hi res music.....and... absolutely necesary if I want to continue using my beautiful Marantz Quad amp. I don't know if y'all are like me, but I don't use my OPPO for playing bluray movies. I utilize it for MUSIC ONLY to preserve its life....and...regular bluray players are a dime a dozen because folks are getting rid of them in mass (I picked up a samsung bd 1500 for 6.99 the other day and have picked up multiple others for $10). My preferred bluray movie player is a TOTL Sony bdp 1 (a trade from a pawn shop for for 2 gold crowns I kept after a trip to the dentist) ! Moving right along, I am saving these flac files on two separate computer drives (which I will later remove and plug into another PC when My I7 Dell gives up the ghost). I am downloading just the dts master flacs (no video) to a TINY 132 gb usb stick which will stay permananntly plugged into the front usb port and is practically unnoticable. A big upside to this is utilizing the great sounding OPPO 's A-D converters in playing back these files. I am also thinking about the day when my OPPO drive stops working ( hopefully I'll still be able to listen to my bluray master audio files). I didn't realize how many bluray surround discs I had until I started on this journey. So far I have 27 discs converted, with about a dozen more to go. So far, the usb drive is about half full. I'm not planning on converting the dvda's and sacd's I have because I have 3 players and well over a hundred discs (I'm not picking today to count them all). It took me a couple of hours getting used to this operation, but it is pretty basic stuff. Set mkv to flac, Name a destination folder, put in disc, download disc mkv to the folder (on your desktop so you can find it) open music helper, separate into flac file, send flac files to the folder you designated, then send folder to the usb stick. Also a big shout out to SNOOD who got me interested in doing this.

 

[riskylogic]

A great big thanks to HOMER giving me the heads up on mkv and media music helper software. I am in the process of converting all of my multichannel surround blurays to multichannel 96/24 flac files. Why? because my OPPO 95 is the only bluray player I have with multichannel analogue outputs (rca jacks) and getting another analogue out player seems to be very unlikely (my mission to obtain an Oppo 205 came up fruitless)....and.....this is my much preferred method of listening to hi res music.....and... absolutely necesary if I want to continue using my beautiful Marantz Quad amp. I don't know if y'all are like me, but I don't use my OPPO for playing bluray movies. I utilize it for MUSIC ONLY to preserve its life....and...regular bluray players are a dime a dozen because folks are getting rid of them in mass (I picked up a samsung bd 1500 for 6.99 the other day and have picked up multiple others for $10). My preferred bluray movie player is a TOTL Sony bdp 1 (a trade from a pawn shop for for 2 gold crowns I kept after a trip to the dentist) ! Moving right along, I am saving these flac files on two separate computer drives (which I will later remove and plug into another PC when My I7 Dell gives up the ghost). I am downloading just the dts master flacs (no video) to a TINY 132 gb usb stick which will stay permananntly plugged into the front usb port and is practically unnoticable. A big upside to this is utilizing the great sounding OPPO 's A-D converters in playing back these files. I am also thinking about the day when my OPPO drive stops working ( hopefully I'll still be able to listen to my bluray master audio files). I didn't realize how many bluray surround discs I had until I started on this journey. So far I have 27 discs converted, with about a dozen more to go. So far, the usb drive is about half full. I'm not planning on converting the dvda's and sacd's I have because I have 3 players and well over a hundred discs (I'm not picking today to count them all). It took me a couple of hours getting used to this operation, but it is pretty basic stuff. Set mkv to flac, Name a destination folder, put in disc, download disc mkv to the folder (on your desktop so you can find it) open music helper, separate into flac file, send flac files to the folder you designated, then send folder to the usb stick. Also a big shout out to SNOOD who got me interested in doing this.

I have everything (DVDAs, blurays, and SACDs) ripped to a network server. I think I'm up to 800 GB - and that's only about 230 titles. Multichannel files take up a lot of space.

I only use the Oppo 105 drive to rip SACDs. I have a Sony X800 that I play discs with. It also does multichannel just fine off the network.

I used to use RCA multichannel, but I just use HDMI now. I do use the XLR outputs from the Oppo 105 for stereo. I also use the XLR preamp outs from my Yamaha receiver to my Classe stereo amp, so I'm basically just using the receiever as a preamp. You should be able to do the same thing with your Marantz amp. They are pricey, but there are such things as AV preamps - Marantz has two models, Yamaha also has one.

I don't think your Oppo will play off the network, but you could use an e-SATA drive.

 

[Jim the Oldbie]

I've been listening to nothing but FLACs for years now, can't remember the last time I listened to (or watched) a disc in real time. Everything I buy goes right to the server.

Lately I've been upgrading part of my backup server to make it go a little faster. I realized that an old hand-me-down PC, with the addition of a $15 Gigabit Ethernet card, could do file transfers at full network speed - a lot faster than an old Synology NAS box I've been using (the first one I ever bought).

Man, if anyone would've suggested even 10 years ago that I'd ever be looking at 24TB of storage here (with a full backup), I'd have said they were nuts. But here we are...

 

[PmikeK]

Via foobar;HDMI into receiver

OR

Via USB; Oppo 93 Blu Ray Player

Foobar up to 7.1

 

[Jim the Oldbie]

I like Foobar a lot. My main audio rig runs Foobar on a cheap little Dell netbook pulling FLAC files from the network, with HDMI out going into a splitter, then a pair of miniDSP nanoAVR-HDAs (see avatar), then full-active right into the power amps & speakers. That's the whole deal. I talk to it on the phone.

 

[marpow]

This thread popped up and I can't believe how far I have come since 2017 posts 21 & 23. Thank you Kal, Garry, and Brian, plus a host of others. I knew I wanted to go all digital but seemed such a big project but like others Gene, myself you just have to keep digging and scratching and it will all come to fruition if you are patient and willing to make mistakes. I can play any file, stereo or MCH, any bitrate, etc.
I use my PC with JRiver as the player on my PC, flawless every day, using the newest MC 26 with an internal 64 bit drive that I have purchased from them.
Synology NAS (external hard drive) with a back up hard drive that I only use for spare storage, just in case and is not hooked up all the time. Intel NUC as my computer that runs the show externally from my laptop PC which is at my listening station. An external MCH DAC ExaSound38.
Goes like this: Laptop ethernet connected to Netgear switch, Intel NUC to switch, USB out from NUC to DAC and HDMI out to AVR. The DAC is 5.1 coax out into AVR. The NAS hard drive USB out to NUC. The NAS, laptop and the NUC are on the network. So all tidy and connected. Ease of playing, organization is flawless. I use a remote access program called Splashtop from my laptop to the NUC for access. The JRiver player is on the NUC.
Ripping can be challenging at times. The easiest rips are SACD rips into dsf files, stereo or MCH. I use an OPPO 105 that is set up and it's only function is to rip SACD's,100% good. I do not use it for anything else. DVD audios are ripped via DVD Audio Extractor 99% good. DTS rips are DVD AE with a DTS Foobar plug in, 99% good, there are maybe 1 or 2 DTS discs that everyone has trouble with ripping. Blu Ray ripping is the most challenging but HomerJau's Music Media Helper keeps getting better so the Blu Ray ripping keeps getting better.
Last, of course anybody can purchase MCH, best is NATIVE DSD, files or stereo files, I use exclusively HDTracks and Acoustic Sounds.
All of the above is probably about 2 years to put together and a little sweating and I would guess about $1500.00 not including the external DAC.
The PRO of all this is having beautiful music at my finger tips all the time, to play any type of music without looking through stacks of hard discs, wondering what to play where they are, etc. I don't think I could ever go back as the sonic quality of all the recordings are as delivered plus a little better with what JRiver does and the external DAC.
The CON, is while not using hard discs, I sometimes wish that I was looking at a screen of info like pictures, lyrics, backgrounds, etc, but I have yet to sell any of my discs so if I wanted to, I could.
I am not a computer literate person, I am self taught, and I am not afraid to make mistakes. I do not have a job where I am at computer all the time, and everything I put together was mostly evenings and weekends. If it where not for the kind people on this site, I without doubt would not been able to pull it off.
It took me 3 months to rip all my discs, now I just rip as I get them.
I offer my help to anyone as others have helped me, that said, others are still smarter than me. Hopefully I explained my experience well enough for the newbie, as I was definitely a newbie before I started.
Hate to say it, but if I could do it, anybody can.

 

[TVB]

Wow...These last few posts really show what is possible. Just backing up blurays was challenging to me. I'm still stuck in the past and a simpleton compared to you guys.

 

[marpow]

Wow...These last few posts really show what is possible. Just backing up blurays was challenging to me. I'm still stuck in the past and a simpleton compared to you guys.

What is most important is that your trying and that is better than most. I made an outline of only what I wanted to accomplish in a certain week and just stuck with that, and after a couple of years I did it. It's somewhat of a snowball effect the more you accomplish the faster each accomplishment occurs.

 

[jonmchugh]

I can play multichannel flacs directly on my kodi box but it converts them to Dolby digital ac3 640kbit for transport over spdif coaxial, it does not sound great so I prefer to convert them to 44khz or 48khz DTS using mas or surcode and save these as was files. The kodi box will play these as DTS bitstreams to the reciever. I also have Linux scripts for converting flacs to lossless dtshd-ma avchd discs to play on my bluray player with the analogue multichannel outputs but I've stopped doing this as I can't tell the difference from dts-sd and its simpler to stream from the kodi box.

 

[jimfisheye]

I've been listening to nothing but FLACs for years now, can't remember the last time I listened to (or watched) a disc in real time. Everything I buy goes right to the server.

Lately I've been upgrading part of my backup server to make it go a little faster. I realized that an old hand-me-down PC, with the addition of a $15 Gigabit Ethernet card, could do file transfers at full network speed - a lot faster than an old Synology NAS box I've been using (the first one I ever bought).

Man, if anyone would've suggested even 10 years ago that I'd ever be looking at 24TB of storage here (with a full backup), I'd have said they were nuts. But here we are...

I have a similar amount of connected storage.
Considering building a NAS... we'll see. The Mac Pro I have has 4 3.5" bays and 2 5.25" bays and a 1000W p/s that's made to be used. Kind of haven't needed to look further. USB connected backup drives and bluray disc data backups.

I rip anything disc based as it comes up. Maybe once in a while I'll be impatient and listen to a new bluray directly off the disc with Kodi Media Center player.

Just plugging an audio interface (or multiple) into a computer and having freedom of access to all formats in their fullest quality has been happiness and light for the last 20 years. I just shake my head at everyone stubbornly clinging to these hardware disc players and consumer surround receivers and putting up with the limitations and restrictions like it's still 1985.

 

[beerking]

This thread popped up and I can't believe how far I have come since 2017 posts 21 & 23. Thank you Kal, Garry, and Brian, plus a host of others. I knew I wanted to go all digital but seemed such a big project but like others Gene, myself you just have to keep digging and scratching and it will all come to fruition if you are patient and willing to make mistakes. I can play any file, stereo or MCH, any bitrate, etc.
I use my PC with JRiver as the player on my PC, flawless every day, using the newest MC 26 with an internal 64 bit drive that I have purchased from them.
Synology NAS (external hard drive) with a back up hard drive that I only use for spare storage, just in case and is not hooked up all the time. Intel NUC as my computer that runs the show externally from my laptop PC which is at my listening station. An external MCH DAC ExaSound38.
Goes like this: Laptop ethernet connected to Netgear switch, Intel NUC to switch, USB out from NUC to DAC and HDMI out to AVR. The DAC is 5.1 coax out into AVR. The NAS hard drive USB out to NUC. The NAS, laptop and the NUC are on the network. So all tidy and connected. Ease of playing, organization is flawless. I use a remote access program called Splashtop from my laptop to the NUC for access. The JRiver player is on the NUC.
Ripping can be challenging at times. The easiest rips are SACD rips into dsf files, stereo or MCH. I use an OPPO 105 that is set up and it's only function is to rip SACD's,100% good. I do not use it for anything else. DVD audios are ripped via DVD Audio Extractor 99% good. DTS rips are DVD AE with a DTS Foobar plug in, 99% good, there are maybe 1 or 2 DTS discs that everyone has trouble with ripping. Blu Ray ripping is the most challenging but HomerJau's Music Media Helper keeps getting better so the Blu Ray ripping keeps getting better.
Last, of course anybody can purchase MCH, best is NATIVE DSD, files or stereo files, I use exclusively HDTracks and Acoustic Sounds.
All of the above is probably about 2 years to put together and a little sweating and I would guess about $1500.00 not including the external DAC.
The PRO of all this is having beautiful music at my finger tips all the time, to play any type of music without looking through stacks of hard discs, wondering what to play where they are, etc. I don't think I could ever go back as the sonic quality of all the recordings are as delivered plus a little better with what JRiver does and the external DAC.
The CON, is while not using hard discs, I sometimes wish that I was looking at a screen of info like pictures, lyrics, backgrounds, etc, but I have yet to sell any of my discs so if I wanted to, I could.
I am not a computer literate person, I am self taught, and I am not afraid to make mistakes. I do not have a job where I am at computer all the time, and everything I put together was mostly evenings and weekends. If it where not for the kind people on this site, I without doubt would not been able to pull it off.
It took me 3 months to rip all my discs, now I just rip as I get them.
I offer my help to anyone as others have helped me, that said, others are still smarter than me. Hopefully I explained my experience well enough for the newbie, as I was definitely a newbie before I started.
Hate to say it, but if I could do it, anybody can.

I can assure you of this.....You are not alone!!
A year ago I started this ripping experience and although I don't use a NUC, the freedom I have in playing whatever I wish, from my PC, via external hard drives, without any hassle, is very welcome.
It is a steep learning curve and I fully agree, without the help and support from fellow QQr's, I would still be in the ripping wilderness.

 

[jimfisheye]

There can be some learning curves to go through when new formats come along for sure!
Ripping a full decode of DTS2496 (and not just a partial core decode) was one of the last ringers to come along, for example. Or properly transcoding DSD to PCM with 32:1 decimation and all that.

So that was some learning and software hunting to do.
Contrast that with the stand alone hardware equipment though...
You could literally have a machine sitting there with very expensive DACs and everything and your only choice to play a new format would be to replace it. It still works. It's expensive and includes expensive sub-components. And you really have to throw it out and start over!
I'll take the learning curve every now and then please and thank you!

 

[Jim the Oldbie]

Wow...These last few posts really show what is possible. Just backing up blurays was challenging to me. I'm still stuck in the past and a simpleton compared to you guys.

Nah - we were all there at some point or another.

 

[HomerJAU]

I can play multichannel flacs directly on my kodi box but it converts them to Dolby digital ac3 640kbit for transport over spdif coaxial, it does not sound great so I prefer to convert them to 44khz or 48khz DTS using mas or surcode and save these as wav files.

Kodi will play multichannel FLAC directly at up to 8 Ch 192kHz. So no need to listen to AC3 transcoding.

What is your hardware? Maybe I can help you to get your FLACs playing without needing to convert to DTS. What a pain that must be!

 

[jimfisheye]

The real catch-22 is the consumer surround receivers that were/are made with literally no discrete surround capable input. Such models ONLY have a SPDIF or TOSLINK digital input and can ONLY receive lossy dts or dolby encoded surround. Crap like this really was sold! Crap like this is STILL sold! It's aimed at people only watching movies and considered plenty good enough for those soundtracks. And you're kind of screwed if you want to move forward and listen fully to your discrete media. Time for a USB, firewire, or thunderbolt connecting audio interface.

 

[jonmchugh]

Bu

Kodi will play multichannel FLAC directly at up to 8 Ch 192kHz. So no need to listen to AC3 transcoding.

What is your hardware? Maybe I can help you to get your FLACs playing without needing to convert to DTS. What a pain that must be!

My Receiver does not have HDMI input, Only SPDIF or Mch Analogue inputs, I could get a good 6ch analogue sound card for the Kodi box but I don't believe the difference will be audible, I'm a Hi-Rez audio skeptic!

It's not so much of a pain as I've written linux shell scripts to take Flac's, DVDA Iso's & SACD Iso's and automattically convert to DTS(sd) Wav's and also DTS(hd) AVCHD Iso's I can play on the BluRay players 192kHz analogue outputs.

 

[jonmchugh]

I would not consider DTS lossy (perceptually), 1509kbit is a huge amount of bandwidth for a lossy codec, Load a DTS decode vs lossless into audacity and invert and merge them, There will be nothing of audible frequency or amplitude missing.
Even try running a DTS decode through a tool called auCDtect - It cannot detect the audio has been passed though a lossy codec, Its says its 100% sure its pure CDDA.

 

[Eclectic]

I also like Foobar, but I use it mainly for transcoding prior to upload. My setup is a fanless NUC (or Raspberry Pi) running Kodi / OSMC, reading my files off a modern (100 MB/s read or write) Synology NAS, feeding HDMI straight into an HTR. I control it using the Kodi App running on my phone (and my son's, and my wife's). I store all lossless files as flac, but I leave lossy DTS files in that format and let my HTR decode them. I'v had this setup for about five years, and I love it. It's cheap, easy to use, and sounds great. I love not having to turn on a TV or (God forbid) fiddle with an fragile optical disc. I also love that I can continue to use my 25 -year-old speakers, which still sound great.

I like Foobar a lot. My main audio rig runs Foobar on a cheap little Dell netbook pulling FLAC files from the network, with HDMI out going into a splitter, then a pair of miniDSP nanoAVR-HDAs (see avatar), then full-active right into the power amps & speakers. That's the whole deal. I talk to it on the phone.

 

[jimfisheye]

I would not consider DTS lossy (perceptually), 1509kbit is a huge amount of bandwidth for a lossy codec, Load a DTS decode vs lossless into audacity and invert and merge them, There will be nothing of audible frequency or amplitude missing.
Even try running a DTS decode through a tool called auCDtect - It cannot detect the audio has been passed though a lossy codec, Its says its 100% sure its pure CDDA.

There are literally lossy versions of dts. The original core format is only lossy. Only the newer dts-ma is lossless.
We can form opinions on how much damage we hear being done. But it's a fact the core dts format is lossy.
It's a step beyond mp3 level damage IMHO. Encoding the multichannel to a 2 channel container and decoding it back adds another level beyond what lossy compression does.

I'd expect that a modest audio interface with 6 channels of analog output connected to analog inputs on a surround receiver would be very noticeably better/cleaner than listening to the lossy format through the digital connection. And further, if it didn't... I'd go looking for what setting I was screwing up or whatever the faux pas was because it absolutely should be significantly less loss there even with the analog connection.

You can scare up an interface with 6 outputs used for $50 - $100. A pro quality device with balanced/unbalanced outputs, not just some consumer quality device. I would definitely make that purchase in this scenario. And then you get the convenience of the computer media players and access to all formats in their full quality.


I posted a little experiment to this forum a few years ago comparing dts2496 vs lossless - with the aim to show that it even almost nulls with lossless. Not 100% but down at least 80db I think it was. The lossy dts decode however was very apparent to A/B and the null test left very audible results. It didn't come even close to nulling. This was with the Jethro Tull Aqualung release that included the same mastered program on fully lossless bluray and dts2496 on DVDV.

At the end of the day, the audio master comes from the studio in HD discrete lossless format. We can deliver it that way fully with FLAC or bluray. We can connect the audio stream through our devices with no loss. Everything is convenient. There's kind of no reason to keep messing with cramming multiple channels into old 2 channel containers and critiquing out encoder/decoder schemes to see how much arrived at the other end.

 

[jonmchugh]

.
lossless vs. dts 24/96 fully decoded
I don't believe I hear anything A/Bing the files. The difference file has some audible stuff from the cymbals though.

I think this statement is key, at the end of the day, if you can't actually hear it what's the point.
secondary consideration is you save an awful lot of disc space on your NAS using DTS vs flac files.

also worth pointing out I do not encode to DTS96.24 as you are wasting valuable bandwidth encoding ultrasonics no one can hear taking away bandwidth that could otherwise be used encoding stuff you can actually hear. Dts96 was the biggest con ever, unless your a dog I suppose.