Bugzilla – Bug 4311
White noise playing 48/24 FLACs decoded by server
Last modified: 2009-06-11 11:46:45 UTC
Possibly related to bug #4026 Firmware 64, SS 6.5 48/24 WAVs play fine, 48/24 FLACs play fine streaming as FLAC using internal decoder, 48/24 FLACs decoded on server and streamed as WAV are played as white noise.
I couldn't seem to reproduce this, Adrian. Have you had a chance to see if this still happens in the nightly builds since bug 4026 was fixed?
I haven't tried any nightly builds - I'm just on the last official release which should be post bug 4026. If SB internally decodes the FLACs o.k. that suggests (to me) the firmware is fine, it's just where the server decodes which would seem to be either how SS is 'communicating' with FLAC.exe or the stream from FLAC.exe is somehow being changed. I could upload one of the files (~6MB) I've been trying to play. The same files play fine in Winamp with FLAC plugin.
Sure, I'll take a file upload if you would. Anything to help me try to repro!
http://www.zen93281.zen.co.uk/files/03%20-%20Stupid%20Dream.flac Ripped from a DVD-A (video_ts folder) using DVD Audio Extractor - source was 2 channel 48/24 so no conversion performed. Tried FLAC creation using FLAC Frontend and DBPowerAmp - same results with each. Also tried various compression levels, this file was created with DBPowerAmp(FLAC 1.1.2a) and compression 8. In all cases the SB itself will play but the server decoding sends white noise. I have also had white noise streaming a non-PCM WAV, is it possible in decoding a 48/24 FLAC the server is straming non-PCM?
Okay, I can reproduce it on the file you uploaded, even in the current 7.0 build. On my "File Types" page, I unchecked all the flac options except for the last one (FLAC WAV flac), went to browse music folder, and clicked 'play' on the file. As an additional experiment, I tried decoding the file with flac.exe from the command line, and was (strangely) able to play the resulting output (.wav) with no problem. Dan please let me know if there is more I can do to test this for you.
will look at this post-7.0
This bug combined to bug #4774 results in a impossibility of transcoding FLAC to WAV on the server at all, even when you store 24/48 files on another format (WMA, for instance). Is there any previsional date on fixing this ?
Steven, can you have a look at reproducing this with 7.3?
Unfortunately this issue is still present in 7.3. Alan, would you have time to take a look at this before the release of 7.3?
The problem is that the system assumes that all WAV generated by transcoders will be 44100/16/2/little-endian. I do not see a straightforward way to fix this and also am not sure that there is much point. Under what circumstances would one want to stream WAV in preference to FLAC? The flac program used for this transcoding does not have the capability to resample (rate) or change sample-size. Switching to sox would be an option, but this would require an updated version of sox, with flac support (bug 9997). If you have your own version of sox with the necessary support then you could do this. Another option would be to have the firmware decode the WAV header and use the parameters from it (bug 10000), but I cannot see that being high priority.
*** Bug 10518 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I really cannot see the actual problem here. Repeating the question from comment #10, under what circumstances would one want to stream WAV in preference to FLAC?
Alan-- if I understand you're question right, the answer is: if a user wishes to listen to pure WAV rather than transcoding to FLAC we need to provide that solution. That is not an uncommon request from some power users who believe their WAV files are of superior quality. Whether they are right or wrong is beside the point-- our hardware and software promise native playback of WAV files. Forcing a conversion to FLAC will be an unacceptable change to those users.
That is not my understanding of the original question. "48/24 WAVs play fine, 48/24 FLACs play fine streaming as FLAC using internal decoder, 48/24 FLACs decoded on server and streamed as WAV are played as white noise." That is, the problem only occurs if server-side decoding of the FLAC is used. Streaming a WAV file works fine. Streaming a FLAC file works fine.