I've edited this. My fix below doesn't work. If someone has a solution to the problem let me know.
I have created a zone for my large collection of dts encoded audio files (mostly as albums). In trying to come up with a rule to use for creating the zone, I realized that file extensions would not be enough since many wav files are not dts encoded. So, I had already added 'Channels > 2' and 'file type contains wav,dts,dtshd' as a rule for the zone. This was an easy way to spot misfit tracks in the folder that was supposed to contain only dts encoded albums/tracks.
Yesterday I noticed that some tracks (even some from within the same album) were not being picked up by my Onkyo receiver as DTS. What was weird was that if I opened those tracks from the Windows file browser using other audio players like foobar 2000 or VLC, they showed as 6 channel and were recognized by my Onkyo receiver as dts encoded. So I blamed it on MC
, and spent hours today researching these forum threads for similar issues.
I also thought of looking for some other tag that might act as a clue to the issue, and noticed the 'Compression' tag always contained 'dts', regardless if the extension was wav, dts, or dtshd. So I added Compression as a column in the library view for the 'DTS Audio' zone.
Sure enough, the tracks that were not being picked up by my receiver as dts encoded had Compression showing as 'None (PCM)' and Channels as '2'. I found it really weird that some of these tracks were from the same album (that was supposedly encoded in dts) - i.e. just 2 or 3 of the tracks on the album had this issue. And, like I said, they played fine (e.g in full dts 5.1) in foobar, etc.
Anyhow, I tried a few conversions on my own (which were not very timely) and ultimately stumbled upon a very simple solution.
I found that if I just renamed the troubled track to use a 'dts' extension it worked just fine in MC. So I use the command window to rename the file extension for the entire album for any album that contained tracks with this 'None (PCM)' issue. (E.g. open the Command prompt in the folder containing the album and enter the command: "ren *.wav *.dts"
Boom! Problem solved. Just posting in the hope that this helps someone else who might come upon this same issue.