Is there a working SACD iso player for Ubuntu?

Question

So here is the thing ... I used to listen to a huge collection of SACD iso files on Windows.

Many albums are released as SACDs for the audiophiles around the World. Imho 90% of these SACD albums are mastered far, far better than the original CDs. This is the whole reason behind the SACDs.

The reason I listen to them on my PC using a DAC (with native DSD support) is that these SACDs are extremely expensive. I have a friend in Russia who sends me ISO files of these SACDs.

On Windows I can use Foobar2000 with some plugins with ease. On Ubuntu I see no alternatives.

Is there a way to listen to these SACD iso files on Ubuntu ? I would prefer not to convert the DSD content to flac. I would like to use the native DSD capabilities of my Denon DA-300.

Solution 1

Audio players found in the repositories (VLC, Totem amongst others), do not play DSD natively.

DeaDBeeF plays both DSD64 and DSD128 through ffmeg. From comment in a release topic:

waker Owner Maxim • 4 years ago
dsd is supported, sorta. you need to use ffmpeg plugin, linked with the system version of ffmpeg, which has DSD support compiled. then all you need is to include the needed file extension to the list of ffmpeg plugin's file ext list.

MPD has a SACD plugin. But the DSD files must be extracted from the SACD image. The SACD image cannot be loaded directly into mpd unfortunately.

Solution 2

I recommend using sacd from: https://github.com/Sound-Linux-More/sacd .

Install it via:

git clone https://github.com/Sound-Linux-More/sacd
cd sacd
make

Then use it as documented via it's builtin help, i.e ./sacd --help:

Usage: sacd -i infile [-o outdir] [options]

  -i, --infile         : Specify the input file (*.iso, *.dsf, *.dff)
  -o, --outdir         : The folder to write the WAVE files to. If you omit
                         this, the files will be placed in the input file's
                         directory
  -c, --stdout         : Stdout output (for pipe), sample:
                         sacd -i file.dsf -c | play -
  -r, --rate           : The output samplerate.
                         Valid rates are: 88200, 96000, 176400 and 192000.
                         If you omit this, 88.2KHz will be used.
  -s, --stereo         : Only extract the 2-channel area if it exists.
                         If you omit this, the multichannel area will have priority.
  -p, --progress       : Display progress to new lines. Use this if you intend
                         to parse the output through a script. This option only
                         lists either one progress percentage per line, or one
                         status/error message.
  -d, --details        : Show detailed information about the input
  -h, --help           : Show this help message

Solution 3

While both MPlayer and FFmpeg balk at playing an iso file of DSD files it looks like MPlayer, FFplay and SMPlayer will all support playback of DSD files (or groups of files) 'out of the box' once an iso is mounted and individual files can be selected.

On my own system I downloaded the following free DSD sample file with wget as follows:

wget http://www.lindberg.no/hires/test/2L-145/2L-45_stereo_01_DSF_2822k_1b.dsf

The command line MPlayer will play this file back using ffdsdlsbfp for the audio track and ffmjpeg for the small video / graphics embedded in this file. The command I have used for this file was:

mplayer -xy 400 -vo xv 2L-45_stereo_01_DSF_2822k_1b.dsf

The sound playback was fine but the image looked a little ordinary, I have not experimented further with other files to see if this is a general issue. Screenshot below of MPLayer in action, bear in mind the SMPlayer will achieve the same result if you are after a gui:

I am a little puzzled why MPlayer will not play directly from the iso I created of this file, it would normally do so, but that seems to be the state of play at the moment...

Comments

[kasperd]

Why do you not want to convert the files to FLAC? As long as you get the data to the DAC and don't use any lossy transformations on the way the resulting audio would be the same.

[Tutisss]

there's a linux version of jriver in the works, for now is the best "simple" solution on the horizon but it probably wont be free

[bteo]

Thanks! That's what I meant!

[Rinzwind]

Don't get your hopes up ;-) Getting ffmpeg to play nice might be diffficult

[Manu]

This worked beautifully for me.

[shantiq]

On Ubuntu You need "sudo make install" after make too

[Yaroslav Nikitenko]

This is nice. Unfortunately, it didn't play with play (I heard just some hissing and ticking). By default (with -i) it unpacks the iso into wav files.