Hi everybody,
first of all sorry for my bad english.
I would like to have your suggestions about the best way of storing SACD individual tracks, if DFF or DSF. I know this is an old question but I would like to collect here all the best practice from those of you who deal with a lot of DSD files inside MC.
I'm an MC user since release 17 (now I'm at 26.0.73).
Currently I have thousands of SACD .ISO images that plays perfectly through MC (bitstreaming them to a Mytek Brooklyn DAC+ and to an Emm Labs DCC2 via a custom USB interface) but MC's SACD .ISO support is very disappointing (can't rename/move files, can't programmatically change the filename name/path fields, "album.iso;x" become "album.iso", metadata reset to data on the disc, filename path automatically change to "[Artist] - [Album]", ...) and it seems that they are not interested at all in fixing it.
Therefore I'm planning to extract DSD audio for .ISO images (and then manually update the fields in the MC database to point to the new file/format).
Before doing so, and being aware that I cannot retain the .ISOs (because they currently use 7,13TB of disk space), I would like to be sure which format to use and how the conversion should be achieved.
So the questions are:
1) which format should I choose between DFF and DSD ? and, if DFF, should I convert DST to DFF ?
I read a lot about this and it seems that the best format depends mainly on the hardware you use to play the files i.e. they should play identically but different DACs (or USB interfaces to DACs) have different behaviours playing the two formats.
I did a test with few disks (one was Pink Floyd TDSOTM); I extracted DFF and DSD with sacd_extract 0.38 (so NO -z, --dsf-nopad option), no DST to DSD conversion, and both play the same on my audio systems (specifically there are no clicks or glitchs nor silence between tracks). In any case, a test over few disks can never be exhaustive for a large collection ...
Based on what I read, converting DST to DSD only reduces the CPU overhead when playing the file; is it correct ?
And more, DSF can handle metadata like FLAC does, though MC's sidecars do their job and I'm not a fan of changing an audio file for storing metadata ...
What do you think about these two formats and how you tag them ? Can you tell about your experience using these two formats ?
2) which software should I use to extract DFF or DSF from the ISO images ?
Should or should not this extraction be lossless i.e. perfectly reversible ? I'm a little bit concerned here about the different results with different versions of sacd_extract.
As I said, I used sacd_extract 0.38 for my tests, and I binary compared the extracted stereo files with the ones extracted with sacd_extract 0.36 and with RD James's sacd_extract (say the 0.40, posted here:
https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,119883.msg828849.html#msg828849, NO -z, --dsf-nopad option): the DFFs are almost the same (but not identical) while the DSFs are quite different; they all play the same on my audio systems.
Do you have any hints/tips here ?
Thanks everybody for reading this long post and for every comments you would like to post !
P.S. I will also try posting a request about fixing MC's SACD .ISO support since I really think using the ISOs would be the best way ...