Transcoding only multichannel dsf files

[Veganfloyd]

Thank you very much, Simon. Just to confirm, it was the same DSF file.

In the meantime as we were discussing things here, I found out that silent LFE channels can be added to DSF files using Music Media Helper from the quadraphonicquad forum. They are not completely silent at the moment (quiet thuds at the beginning of tracks), but the developer is very responsive to bug reports and I hope it will be fixed. This is my intended solution/workaround at the moment.

[Veganfloyd]

So I found the perfect solution that works for my end goal - even better than what I was hoping to achieve in this thread. It doesn't directly address/solve my original query, but I thought I'd share it here regardless.

I realised today that my renderer, Sony UBP=X800m2 blu-ray player, may actually be able to play dsf files natively over home network. I briefly tried it in the past with no success, but I thought it may be worthwhile to revisit this. Sony of course lists DSF as a playable file format (being the original developer of SACD), but notes that "The player may not play this file format on a Home Network server." But so it does for any other lossless format listed in the manual and I've never had any problems with FLACs/WAVs. This is probably just a precautionary note/excuse for customer support not to cover this in case problems arise, but note that there may potentially be a problem on this end. A few minutes of searching through the forum and Minimserver's user guide lead me to this serverOption: mimeType.dsf=audio/x-dsd (and common sense dictated that I disable dsf transcoding by Minimstreamer). Voilà, now I can natively stream dsf files from Minimserver, including 5.0 files! I'm chuffed to bits that Minimserver can do this. Thank you, Simon!

Back to the original topic, in case anybody was in dire need of adding silent LFE to 5.0 DSF files, as mentioned in the previous post the developer of Music Media Helper is working on a fix for it. He kindly offered an ad hoc solution copy-pasted below. I tried it out and it worked for me. Note that SoX with DSD support is required, which can be found here: https://audiodigitale.eu/repo/sox/

"Create a ’Convert.bat’ (text) file in your folder containing your DSF files and add this text to the .bat file:
----

if not exist "Output" mkdir "Output"

for %%A IN (*.dsf) do (
"C:\xxx\xxx\Sox.exe" "%%~nA.DSF" "Output\%%A" remix 1 2 3 3 4 5
)
pause

The corrected dsf files will be created in a new sub-folder named: Output under the current DSF input folder.

The ’C:\xxx\xxx\’ path should be replaced with your current MMH folder which by default will be:
C:\program files (x86)\Music Media Helper\

Note: This will only fix 5.0 formatted DSF files with an existing silent C channel. In the remix argument channel 3 of the input file is copied to the 4th channel (LFE) of the output file."

[simoncn]

Thanks for this post. It should be helpful for other users. Playing your DSF files natively should be a better solution in terms of sound quality.

Thanks also for the detailed description of how to make the transcoding approach work by fixing the DSF files.