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[bsw11]

Is there any chance that someone has made a plugin to handle 5.1 channel dts files wrapped as an .flac?

These files play great in zoomplayer and are smaller than dts .wav files by about 10% and there are tons of DTS surround files to be had (just check the dts newsgroup).

I play these files via spdif out.

It amazes me that no one has got this handled.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[Alex B]

I assume you are using an external DTS decoder (usually a HT receiver).

1. Use a sound card that can pass through unaltered audio stream to SPDIF and has ASIO support. If the files are 44.1 kHz be aware that not all sound cards can handle 44.1 kHz audio without first resampling it to 48 kHz. The Windows kernel mixer resamples automatically when needed, but in this case that would corrupt the DTS encoded signal. ASIO is way to bypass the kernel mixer completely.

2. Use the ASIO playback mode in MJ and disable all digital signal processing (replay gain, internal volume, DSP effects, resampling etc.). MJ will decode the FLAC files to unaltered PCM and your external DTS decoder will not see any difference when compared with direct wav playback. It doesn't matter if the PCM signal is stored in a wav container or if it is compressed a bit by using the FLAC codec - the decoded output is identical.

The above should work on XP. Vista may be different.

[Matt]

It will work on Vista as well, although getting a bit-perfect connection can be tougher.

I never could get a perfect connection with an onboard soundcard, but using ASIO with an M-Audio line-out style card works great. (Audiophile 2496)

[bsw11]

Ok I will give it a try, but I really do not understand why you guys don't make it easier for people to do this.

There are FREE readily available software that I use now in ZoomPlayer that work almost perfect (the almost is because there is still a 1/2 sec or so pause between tracks).   

What I am using are 2 direct show filters that work together to do this:

1 - madflac.ax  you can find it on Doom9
2 - ac3filter_1_46  google it.

If zoomplayer can do it, I am sure you can do it as well.

[Matt]

To make sure I understand, is the issue that you're trying to decode the DTS on your machine for analog output, instead of doing a digital output for outboard decoding (using an amp, etc.)?  Because the latter should work straight-off if you have a bit-perfect connection, and an AC3/DTS decoder filter would not be necessary.