HDCD on any 24Bit DAC

[Dreadhead]

Well after some futzing I have modified Exact Audio Copy to check to see if a file has HDCD Data and if it does use this:

HDCD Software Decoder [Archive] - Doom9's Forum

or:

Index of /~cjk32/hdcd

to convert it to a 24 bit file and then encode to a lossless WMA at with 24 bits. The files aren't much bigger than the 16 bit files because most of the extra bits are zeros anyway.

Pretty cool

Can I hear the difference? haven't tried yet but I certainly like knowing that I can get everything out of the HDCDs. Only problem now is that I will have to go through and re-rip my HDCDs.

[grawk]

Of all the output options, why do you pick lossless wma?

[Dreadhead]

Of all the output options, why do you pick lossless wma?

because I made a choice years ago and that's where I ended up. If you want a test file though I can arrange for WAVs or Flac I just would need to modify some stuff.

[Duggeh]

Outputting to .wav or .flac would be the best flexibility to let people convert to their format of choice if they don't use the dominant one. Lossless WMA is about as popular as .ape in the big scheme these days. I'm very interested because I own a fair few HDCDs but I'd need to be able to work with ALAC.

[Dusty Chalk]

Curious how you added the check part -- I've been thinking about doing this (mental exercise), but couldn't think of how to not run all files through hdcd.exe.

[Dreadhead]

Curious how you added the check part -- I've been thinking about doing this (mental exercise), but couldn't think of how to not run all files through hdcd.exe.

I wrote a batch file that runs the conversion and writes the stderr to a text file, it then parses the text file to see if it found HDCD (if it didn't it just crashes or writes an identical file). If it did find it it copies it back to the input location and moves on to the compression if not then it deletes the file. One issue right now is that I put it in the WMA compressor VBScript file to call the batch file.

In the end it works rather well.

[Dreadhead]

Outputting to .wav or .flac would be the best flexibility to let people convert to their format of choice if they don't use the dominant one. Lossless WMA is about as popular as .ape in the big scheme these days. I'm very interested because I own a fair few HDCDs but I'd need to be able to work with ALAC.

I could easily do it for other formats but I use WMA so I did it for that.

[Dusty Chalk]

I wrote a batch file that runs the conversion and writes the stderr to a text file, it then parses the text file to see if it found HDCD (if it didn't it just crashes or writes an identical file). If it did find it it copies it back to the input location and moves on to the compression if not then it deletes the file. One issue right now is that I put it in the WMA compressor VBScript file to call the batch file.

In the end it works rather well.

Oh, of course You had to put something in front of it anyway to (a) run it through hdcd, and then ( run it through whatever lossless or lossy compression program (except .wmv) anyway.

[Grahame]

Of course you could just decode on the fly if you have a squeezebox based setup, thanks to the sterling work done here (which may be relevant in non SB based setups).

On the fly HDCD decoding. - Squeezebox : Community : Forums

[grawk]

the benefit is in the filters, not the bit depth anyway

[Dusty Chalk]

More or less agreed -- although I interpret that to mean, "having the encoded music correctly decoded".

[Dreadhead]

Of course you could just decode on the fly if you have a squeezebox based setup, thanks to the sterling work done here (which may be relevant in non SB based setups).

On the fly HDCD decoding. - Squeezebox : Community : Forums

Yup. That's the point. Make it work with any DAC.

If people are interested I guess I could give doing building a method for doing this to a FLAC encoder. I'm thinking of making my method more general anyway. I also want to make the temporary file naming scheme time based so I can have more than one file going through HDCD decoding at a time safely with no risk of one overwriting the other.

The only issue is finding the all the various command line options EAC uses by default.