Bugzilla – Bug 1884
Crossfade: don't do it with DTS files
Last modified: 2012-11-24 05:51:15 UTC
Don't crossfade when a DTS track is involved! On my particular receiver, what I hear is the MP3 track fading into white noise, which continues during the whole song. When starting a crossfade, see if we're dealing with a DTS file (either as the song that's ending or the one that's starting). If so, abort the crossfade and play the tracks sequentially.
Vidur - do you know if we can identify DTS files somehow?
Nope, DTS files come in as WAV, so we're unaware of what's actually in the payload.
You can use James Sutula's Dynamic Transition Updater plugin to do this in the mean time. I do this by tagging my DTS and AC3 files with genres DTS and AC3 respectively. I then edit the plugin to not crossfade the genres DTS and AC3. Works great. You can find a link on the plugins page at http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.cgi?PluginsAudio
Recently ran into this problem when MusicIP created a mix with high bitrate tracks including a few DTS ones. At least in my case the receiver locked into the DTS signal after the fade transition has finished. Searching the bug database found this entry. With change 20684 (SC 7.1) the functionality of the Dynamic Transition plugin has been integrated into SC except the "exclude crossfading by genre" (comprehensible if you don't want to manage thousands options). So the question how to do this in 7.3 remains to be answered... Steven, how do you do it nowadays?
To my knowledge, SC still doesn't know if a file contains DTS. Perhaps a genre tag is the right thing to use? Or perhaps a two-level file extension such as .dts.flac or .dts.wav
I like this two-level extension idea (genre tag will be free). I have some ac3 tracks, too. This would make 4 extensions already (although i could always rename those files). OTOH we could create a more generic name like raw.flac...hmm.
I would prefer if we could handle this with a special MP3/APE tag without changing the filenames. Why can't we use the "Encoded by" (TENC) tag to specify the surround format,i.e. DTS or AAC ?
Isn't changing the filename easier than editing tags? Two-level filenames are perfect for situations much like this, eg .tar.gz or .tar.bz2. The dts designator isn't proper metadata... it is really a file type in its own right, that is in turn stuffed into a FLAC. This would also work for .WAV, which does not support tags... although it would be dumb not to FLAC these files because they are highly compressible. Besides that, I'd just prefer not to overload a tag. I don't know if "Encoded by" is widely used today, but I'm imagining it was intended to tell you which program (or person?) created the file, not the file format.
Dean doesn't work here any more :)
Unassigned bugs cannot have a priority.
It might be a /little/ late but I think I've encountered the same problem and put together a fix. I see this when transitioning between FLACs with differing sample rates but I think that's the same problem reported here. The fix is on this pull request: https://github.com/Logitech/slimserver/pull/3