MinimServer transcode help

Mike, I think the references to DSD have confused matters.

You currently have your music files in AIFF format which as Simon has said is a lossless format. Your UQ2 can quite happily play AIFF Files up to 24 bit 192kHz resolution so there is not much really to be gained by decoding all your AIFF files to FLAC and transcoding to WAV on the fly. AIFF, FLAC and WAV are really simply containers for the PCM audio data. Minimserver can certainly serve your AIFF files to your UQ2 but, unfortunately cannot transcode from AIFF to WAV. Only you can decide whether the perceived SQ difference (if any) between transcoding from FLAC to WAV and your AIFF files is worth the time and effort of decoding your whole music library to FLAC.

Perhaps you should try an A/B comparison on a few AIFF against FLAC>WAV files first.

Thanks SJBABBEY - It's not a big deal, I was initially just curious on the transcoding, but as its not possible, I will leave those that are in AIFF as is

sjbabbey posted:

John, Minimserver should be able to send your dff files in their native form to your NDX without the need for any transcoding. Certainly Minimserver loaded on my QNAP can do this with my dsf files which are now playing on my NDS and showing in the app as DSD 2,822.4 kHz 5,644kbs.

Try deleting the dff transcoding line in Minimserver and see if this works for you as I wouldn't expect there to be a difference between serving up dsf and dff files although I prefer the former which can be tagged more easily.

Thanks sjbabbey - no the NDX doesn't play dff files without the dff transcoding line  - maybe there is some other setting in Minimserver I am overlooking, completely mystified at this point.

John,

Can you get hold of a sample dsf file (these are the DSD files I use) and see if minimserver will stream that natively without transcoding (if it does you will see both the sample rate and bitrate showing in the naim app whereas using dopwav only the sample rate is shown). The transcoding section of the user guide does indeed say that dff and dsf can only be transcoded to dopwav but we are trying here to stream in native DSD format without the need for transcoding into a pcm/wav "wrapper". The guide says that the stream.transcode property does not need to be set but I have mine set to "ffmpeg". Do you have the same setting? If not, you could try inputting this setting to see if that solves the issue.

Finally, I would recommend downloading dsf DSD files rather than dff DSD or if you use ISO2DSD to set this to convert to dsf as it allows ID3 tags to be written in the files and especially so if you find that you can stream dsf files using minimserver without having to transcode them to dopwav.

You can always convert the dffs to dsfs, which Minimserver should then play straight to any of the NDs with no probs at all. Maybe it's a case of the ND not 'seeing' the dffs due to their lack of metadata?

Searching dff2dsf should get you the conversion software.

Thanks again sjbabbey, & Andrew - still no joy this time with a dsf file and stream.transcode property set to "ffmpeg" so this will have to remain unsolved for the present - more pressing matters to deal with.

John,

If you have a PC you could try downloading and installing the free/trial version of Asset UPnP (version R5.1) which can stream both dff and dsf files "as is" (unfortunately the Mac version of Asset is only up to R4.6.3 which doesn't yet support DSD). If you can try this with your dsf/dff files, it could pinpoint whether the issue is with Minimserver or somewhere else. 

BTW, what message do you get when you try to stream your native dff/dsf files? Is it the "Can't Play, Skip Track" message? Also, have you tried playing native dff/dsf files direct from your NDX rather than via your nDAC? Did this make any difference? 

johnG posted:

Simon-in-Suffolk posted:

Quick note - with the Naim ND network players you do not need  to insert dff:dopwav and for performance reasons I feel it is better to remove redundant instructions. The minimserver can deliver the DFF files in the way Naim can understand without adding this requirement.

For info I just have two commands in the stream.transcode property .... alac:wav, flac:wav

Simon

Simon, somewhat confused here now - the only way I can play a DSD64 .dff file with my NDX is when the Minimserver stream.transcode property is set to dff:dopwav  - and NStream reports it as DSD format. The Minimstreamer user guide also states that for .dff  the output format must be dopwav.  Is there another way of playing .dff files with Minim ?

Strange, my firmware on my NDX directly seems to recognises DFF and DSF media from MinimServer directly. I definitely don't need  put any transcode settings to repackage my DSD to be contained within a DoP WAV sample using MinimStreamer.

My MinimServer and MinimStreamer are running on Linux on a RPi

Clearly DSD packaged within a DoP WAV sample word is still DSD and it sounds like your NDX is correctly detecting it is DoP DSD data but is inefficient if you don't need to do it. My NDX does however create a DoP stream on the SPDIF output for an offboard DSD DAC.

sjbabbey posted:

John,

BTW, what message do you get when you try to stream your native dff/dsf files? Is it the "Can't Play, Skip Track" message? Also, have you tried playing native dff/dsf files direct from your NDX rather than via your nDAC? Did this make any difference? 

Tried Asset but no joy (works ok with flac). I get "Connecting....." then "No track playing" when trying dff or dsf. Did also try direct from NDX as suggested.  I am going to leave it now for another time so thanks Simon and sjbabbey.

John,

Can you confirm that you've installed Asset v5.1 on your PC Computer i.e. not on the NAS drive,  and used Asset configuration to monitor the folder containing your dsf/dff files for audio files and set up a browsing tree. Finally Asset's Audio Format Streaming for DSF and DFF should be set to "as is".

Hi - Yes to all of the above.

OK finally success - I am still using the old NStream app on my ipad and in a lightbulb moment thought to try the new app on a Samsung tablet.  So the old app doesn't stream native dsd - who would have thought. 

Glad to read that this was just a simple issue and that you were able to solve it.

ATB

Steve