Trouble with 20-bit flacs on piCorePlayer 8.2.0

[DreadfulSupervision]

I'm having trouble playing 20-bit flacs with piCorePlayer 8.2.0 running on a raspberry pi 3 with a HiFiBerry DIGI2 Pro hooked up to a Cambridge Audio CX80 with optical toslink. I also had the same issue with a different HiFiBerry Digi.

As a test, I tried and was able to get these tracks to play with SqueezePlay on my mac, but the volume was too low which makes me think it's just padding them out to 24 bit (or more). This isn't too critical for me on my stereo since I usually just listen to albums. Others would have to worry about volume jumps during playlists. I don't want to mess with the files since other audio apps don't seem to have a problem with these files.

Does anyone have any suggestions? Is anyone else able to get this to work? Is there something in my chain downstream of the pi that doesn't like 20-bit audio? Any troubleshooting ideas? Or perhaps this is a known problem and I don't need to waste a few hours moving dacs around.

And to head off the question, all my 20-bit flacs are from HDCDs. Thanks in advance!

[gordonb3]

Squeezeplay uses libflac-1.2.1 for flac support. While this version is mentioned to be able to handle 24-bit encoded I have in fact never been able to play any 24-bit encoded flac file on any of my Squeezebox devices (Touch, Radio, Receiver, Boom). Various reports on the internet state that anything above 16 bit is buggy to say the least, but I suppose it is possible that this bug does not manifest itself on some platforms (or was patched by the OS maintainers).

[Eyerex]

Not sure if this helps but running a Pi3 with a Meridian Explorer 2 DAC and it plays 24 bit fine

File Format: FLAC
Duration: 3:22
Bitrate: 1492kbps VBR
Sample Rate: 44.1 kHz
Sample Size: 24Bits
File Length: 41,645,270
Location: /mnt/FLAC/FLAC/MQA/2L-077_21_stereo.mqa.flac

[ralphy]

Squeezeplay uses libflac-1.2.1 for flac support. While this version is mentioned to be able to handle 24-bit encoded I have in fact never been able to play any 24-bit encoded flac file on any of my Squeezebox devices (Touch, Radio, Receiver, Boom). Various reports on the internet state that anything above 16 bit is buggy to say the least, but I suppose it is possible that this bug does not manifest itself on some platforms (or was patched by the OS maintainers).

It's more likely that libflac 1.3.2 is being used with squeezelite, as that's the default pcp player configuration.

There is a Squeezeplay extension, however, to use it, requires manually editing startup scripts to disable squeezelite and jivelite first.

[ralphy]

I'm having trouble playing 20-bit flacs with piCorePlayer 8.2.0 running on a raspberry pi 3 with a HiFiBerry DIGI2 Pro hooked up to a Cambridge Audio CX80 with optical toslink. I also had the same issue with a different HiFiBerry Digi.

As a test, I tried and was able to get these tracks to play with SqueezePlay on my mac, but the volume was too low which makes me think it's just padding them out to 24 bit (or more). This isn't too critical for me on my stereo since I usually just listen to albums. Others would have to worry about volume jumps during playlists. I don't want to mess with the files since other audio apps don't seem to have a problem with these files.

Does anyone have any suggestions? Is anyone else able to get this to work? Is there something in my chain downstream of the pi that doesn't like 20-bit audio? Any troubleshooting ideas? Or perhaps this is a known problem and I don't need to waste a few hours moving dacs around.

And to head off the question, all my 20-bit flacs are from HDCDs. Thanks in advance!

Can you provide two flac files I can download, that exhibit this behaviour, so I can you to try to reproduce?

[zordaz]

I'm having trouble playing 20-bit flacs with piCorePlayer 8.2.0 running on a raspberry pi 3 with a HiFiBerry DIGI2 Pro hooked up to a Cambridge Audio CX80 with optical toslink. I also had the same issue with a different HiFiBerry Digi.

As a test, I tried and was able to get these tracks to play with SqueezePlay on my mac, but the volume was too low which makes me think it's just padding them out to 24 bit (or more). This isn't too critical for me on my stereo since I usually just listen to albums. Others would have to worry about volume jumps during playlists. I don't want to mess with the files since other audio apps don't seem to have a problem with these files.

Does anyone have any suggestions? Is anyone else able to get this to work? Is there something in my chain downstream of the pi that doesn't like 20-bit audio? Any troubleshooting ideas? Or perhaps this is a known problem and I don't need to waste a few hours moving dacs around.

And to head off the question, all my 20-bit flacs are from HDCDs. Thanks in advance!

I don't recall having issues with HDCD-decoded flac files on my piCorePlayers and SB Radio's. I think most of them are decoded to 24 bit (not 20), but I'll have to check. Quite some CD's in my collection which are labelled as HDCD doesn't make use of any of the features btw, I only decoded the ones which makes use of Low Range/Peak Extension or Gain adjustments.

[zordaz]

I have checked and all my HDCD-decoded files seems to be 24bit and play well. What tool did you use to convert your HDCD audio to 20bit?

[DreadfulSupervision]

I have checked and all my HDCD-decoded files seems to be 24bit and play well. What tool did you use to convert your HDCD audio to 20bit?

I used libhdcd available here: https://github.com/bp0/libhdcd

I could have padded the files out to 24-bit but all the players I used at the time played 20-bit files just fine.

[DreadfulSupervision]

Can you provide two flac files I can download, that exhibit this behaviour, so I can you to try to reproduce?

Yes I can! Sending a PM!

[DreadfulSupervision]

Not sure if this helps but running a Pi3 with a Meridian Explorer 2 DAC and it plays 24 bit fine

File Format: FLAC
Duration: 3:22
Bitrate: 1492kbps VBR
Sample Rate: 44.1 kHz
Sample Size: 24Bits
File Length: 41,645,270
Location: /mnt/FLAC/FLAC/MQA/2L-077_21_stereo.mqa.flac

Yes, I am able to get 24-bit audio to play without issue, only 20-bit doesn't work.

[garym]

Squeezeplay uses libflac-1.2.1 for flac support. While this version is mentioned to be able to handle 24-bit encoded I have in fact never been able to play any 24-bit encoded flac file on any of my Squeezebox devices (Touch, Radio, Receiver, Boom). Various reports on the internet state that anything above 16 bit is buggy to say the least, but I suppose it is possible that this bug does not manifest itself on some platforms (or was patched by the OS maintainers).

Something odd is happening in your setup. Sorry, I have no suggestions as to what to look at. However, as an alternative experience, I often play 24/96 files on my Transporter and Touch players. If playing to my BOOM or RADIO, LMS automatically downconverts to 24/48. I've had zero issues playing these 24/96 files over the years. This has been true of LMS running on Windows, on Linux, and most recently on piCorePlayer setup on rPi4B or rPi3B+ units.

[DreadfulSupervision]

Can you provide two flac files I can download, that exhibit this behaviour, so I can you to try to reproduce?

Hi, I was just wondering if you've had any success reproducing my issue? Is there anything else I can do to help figure out what's going on?