Streaming SACD ISOs

[jacobacci]

Hi Simon

I hope you are doing well and staying safe in these turbulent times.
I have more than 2'000 SACD ISOs in my music collection and they are quite a pain. To browse and play them I need jRiver. The dCS Mosaic app which I normally use to control my dCS Rossini DAC is best used with a DLNA Server and for me it happens to be Minimserver for many years. THANKS for a great product.

With regard to playing SACD ISOs, there seem to be several possibilities:

• play them using jRiver, which is a pain and does not work well over ethernet (i.e. no gapless)
• extract DSF files from all of them, which would solve the issue for good, but is a monumental tasks (just did 10 yesterday and that was quite a piece of work)
• find a DLNA Server which can deal with SACD ISOs
  

The last possibility seems like a no go at first sight, but I think there might be hope. Just as you use ffmpeg to transcode in Minimserver, might it be possible to use sacd_extract to do the same for ISOs?

I have looked at sacd_extract a bit and it seems there are two functionalities that could enable something like this:

• sacd_extract can extract just the metadata from an ISO. This is a very fast process and should yield all the information needed to display the content of an ISO. I have attached sacd.txt, which is an example of such an output, that could certainly be parsed to deliver the usual metadata
• Once a play command is issued for a track, that track could be extracted on the fly and sent to the DAC just like normal files
  

Do you think something like this might be doable? I am fully aware that such a scheme would not have the usual user interface comfort, but it would suffice to make ISOs streamable to the many users out there who have a significant number of them.

Thanks and best regards
Rudi

[rompolompo]

Rudi,

At the end of the day, the best solution as you indicated is to extract the ISO into dsf files. You should run a script to go through all your files so you don't have to do it manually. Some tagging will be needed but that is pretty easy.

[simoncn]

@Rudi: Thanks for this suggestion.

I have looked at sacd_extract. It is licensed under the GPL (GNU General Public License) which makes it impossible to include it as part of MinimServer or MinimStreamer. Also, it appears that sacd_extract can only extract to a disk file, which is a problem because MinimStreamer transcoding is done entirely in memory. Finally, parsing the metadata output from sacd_extract would be very unreliable as even a small change to the output format could break MinimServer or MinimStreamer.

I think romolompo's suggestion of converting your ISOs using a script is the best solution.

[jacobacci]

(29-03-2020 15:30)simoncn Wrote:  @Rudi: Thanks for this suggestion.

I have looked at sacd_extract. It is licensed under the GPL (GNU General Public License) which makes it impossible to include it as part of MinimServer or MinimStreamer. Also, it appears that sacd_extract can only extract to a disk file, which is a problem because MinimStreamer transcoding is done entirely in memory. Finally, parsing the metadata output from sacd_extract would be very unreliable as even a small change to the output format could break MinimServer or MinimStreamer.

I think romolompo's suggestion of converting your ISOs using a script is the best solution.

Thanks for looking into this, simon. I'll get to work then

[GreenMtnGringo]

FWIW, I believe foobar2000 can play SACD .iso files with the Super Audio CD input plugin:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/sacddecoder/

[Blueberry Gossip]

You could also use the free Sonore ISOtoDSD ,then DSF2FLAC to accomplish converting a SACD.iso to FLAC.

The apps can be downloaded here:

ISO2DSD (v6) - http://www.audiocircle.com/index.php?topic=129913.0

DSF2FLAC (v5) - http://www.audiocircle.com/index.php?topic=129912.0


NB. This requires Java which you may already have if you are running Minimserver & Minimwatch


Additionally TASCAM offer a free Hi-Res DSD/DSF Editor - https://tascam.com/us/product/hi-res_editor/top

[jacobacci]

(01-04-2020 12:13)Blueberry Gossip Wrote:  You could also use the free Sonore ISOtoDSD ,then DSF2FLAC to accomplish converting a SACD.iso to FLAC.

The apps can be downloaded here:

ISO2DSD (v6) - http://www.audiocircle.com/index.php?topic=129913.0

DSF2FLAC (v5) - http://www.audiocircle.com/index.php?topic=129912.0


NB. This requires Java which you may already have if you are running Minimserver & Minimwatch


Additionally TASCAM offer a free Hi-Res DSD/DSF Editor - https://tascam.com/us/product/hi-res_editor/top

Thanks for all the suggestions, guys.
After many years I have moved from jRiver to Roon. So the foobar path unfortunately is not the solution for me.
As I have a large number of ISOs to convert and I need them in a defined folder structure after the conversion, I have now built a set of scripts that allow me to to the conversion using sacd_extract. This is now working quite well.

[lyapounov]

This is the batch file which I used to extract dsf from all my iso files on my iMac

#!/bin/sh
# Note : This file is to be placed in the folder where you want the output
# BASEDIR Is the place where all iso files are
# They can be in many sub directories
# SacdCmd is the place where the application is

BASEDIR="../__ISO"
SacdCmd="/Applications/_mmedias/Audio/iso2dsd_OSX_v6/sacd_extract -2 -s -c -P -i"

find $BASEDIR -type f -name "*.iso" -exec $SacdCmd {} \;