Multichannel FLAC ?

[ajax25]

Anyone know anything about this? I just came across a couple
of files that are FLAC 4.1. One is 16 bit and one is 24 bit, both
are 44.1Khz sample and winamp shows 6 channels. When aplying
in winamp it shows "surround" on the display and plays multichannel
on my 4.1 speakers.

This seems to be lossless and high quality (contrasted to DTS cds).
It seems to be a bunch of streams multiplexed via flac encoding, so
I'm assuming that you can only play this back on some type on
computer based player. The files are larger than a normal flac file
of a stereo song, so even a typical 40 min album probably won't
fit on a regular CD (if there was anything that would play it).

Sorry if this has been mentioned here before, didn't see it when
doing a serach.

 

[Key]

There are some hardware media centers that support FLAC. But for the most part people use them on the computer.
I have no idea if any hardware media players support multichannel FLAC but I know foobar plays it fine and I would
guess since winamp recognized it you could route it to the correct outputs. Right?

Wavpack gives you smaller file sizes and supports multichannel but it is very slow when you decode it. So I think
only one hardware based media player supports it, at least last time I looked.

But yeah DTS is lossy and FLAC is lossless. It seems like hard drives are just about as cheap as CD-Rs and DVD-Rs
so some sort of a hard drive based media player would be nice but I have never been able to find one that would do
everything I need. The Popcorn Hour is about as close as I've seen but I hear it's only decent for movies and not very
good for music. But it does support FLAC. I just don't think the playback is gapless or intuitive in any way.

 

[sKiZo]

er ... the board hiccuped ... how do you delete a message here?

<google google>

Well then ... apparently vBulletin has issues with idempotent propogation. Whooda thunk. I can't delete my own posts ... I have to get an admin or mod to do it ... drat. Too much trouble.

Hate to waste a perfectly good post, so here's a favorite from Deep Thoughts ... by Jack Handy ...

Better not take a dog on the space shuttle, because if he sticks his head out when you're coming home his face might burn up.

 

[sKiZo]

I've been slowly but surly building an HTPC based on XP Media Center. Makes for a nice frontend (the "green button" remote is way kewl) and sound quality is excellent using WMA v9 Lossless (100%) even when converting all my old vinyl. Be warned ... it eats up disk space at the rate of about 5megs a minute, but hey ... that's what they make terrabytes for, eh.

And bonus, I was recently happy to find out that WMA v9 lossless supports 5.1 information ... w00t! I recently discovered SACD (recently enough I just got my first shipment of media in the mail and still waiting on the player) and can't wait to burn Dark Side of the Moon to WMA and see how it turns out.

** Here's a link to the handy dandy Windows Media Encoder ... free's hard to beat ...

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/forpros/encoder/default.mspx

If you do decide to go FLAC, here's another option ...

http://xbmc.org/

I looked seriously into that but the software doesn't handle WMA well and I wasn't convinced I could convert what I got without degrading the output.

 

[QuadMusic]

Anyone know anything about this?

Multi-channel FLAC is my preferred method of storing multi-channel music, both downloads and SQ/QS/CD-4/Q4 conversions. These are then played from a PC connected to a vintage receiver. This obviuosly preserves my vinyl and Q4 reels.

Although I can play DTS and DVD-A discs I'm trying as much as possible to be diskless - all the music and movies I have are stored losslessly on RAID networked storage devices. (I don't have much SACD music but I could presumably rip the analogue output of the player to FLAC.)

There are many other multi-channel formats including WMA, and even MP3(!), but FLAC has good features: open source, lossless, better tagging than WAV, and it's not-Microsoft.

The 16-bit FLAC files you have found are most likely conversions from DTS sources so they won't be any better or any worse - just more convenient for HTPC users. The 24-bit are most likely from original vinyl/Q4 or from DVD-A.

I'm not sure a 24/44.1 format would make a lot of sense. Wouldn't that just be bizarre conversion from a standard audio CD?

PC

 

[ajax25]

For the most part I stopped buring cd/dvds too and store everythying
on external drives. I got a new 5.1 system for my TV and decided to
get a combo player (dvd, sacd,dvd-a, dts-cd). I was blown away by
some of the multi channel stuff I got, but now I have to burn to a
disk to listen. Looks like maybe I need to upgrade by computer
speaker system (4.1 Klipsh) to 5.1.

MC Flac would be a much better format to archive conversions, given
that DTS is lossy. Hopefully those that are doing conversions are archiving
in a lossless format. I like a lot of the old quad mixes over the new
surround mixes, more discreet.