{"id":72,"date":"2013-12-05T22:07:31","date_gmt":"2013-12-05T21:07:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techblog.vindvejr.dk\/?p=72"},"modified":"2013-12-05T22:07:31","modified_gmt":"2013-12-05T21:07:31","slug":"playing-multi-channel-flacs-on-raspbmc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/techblog.vindvejr.dk\/?p=72","title":{"rendered":"Playing multi-channel FLAC’s on Raspbmc"},"content":{"rendered":"

About a year ago I bought a Raspberry Pi<\/a> and installed Raspbmc<\/a>. I wanted to use this cheap little gadget as a media center, filling some of the holes in my existing home entertainment setup. One of the things I was hoping to get out of it was the ability to play multi-channel (5.1) FLAC’s through HDMI to my surround receiver. However, I never got this to work. The same goes for the primary goal – being able to playback my DVD collection from ISO files, but that’s another story…<\/p>\n

The setup:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The FLAC’s are 24 bit with a sample rate of 96 kHz.<\/li>\n
  2. I’m using NFS for efficient file transfer from my NAS.<\/li>\n
  3. The average bitrate for the files is below 10 Mbps.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Raspbmc will try to play the files, but immediately chokes or freezes. I’m ruling out network limitations, since the Pi is wired and able to stream 1080p video at higher bitrates. I had completely given up, thinking it was a shortcoming of Raspbmc itself, when I suddenly, by coincidence, discovered that one of my albums played perfectly. So I started investigating the difference between this album and the all the others that didn’t work. The difference was the bitrate, which was only 48 kHz for the working album.<\/p>\n

    The next step was to downsample a song from 96 kHz to 48 kHz – and this turned out good as well. So now I’ve downsampled all my albums, and can play them all on the Pi. A bit of research led me to SoX<\/a>, one of the best free tools for downsampling audio — amongst a lot of other things. I use it like this:<\/p>\n

    \r\nsox -S orig96.flac -r 48000 -b 24 conv48.flac\r\n<\/pre>\n
    I had to compile it myself, because the version included in my CentOS installation didn’t support FLAC. This was completely straight-forward (configure, make, make install), probably because I already had libFLAC installed. The only think I’m unsure about is if I’ve missed some option to get the best quality downsampling.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
    About a year ago I bought a Raspberry Pi and installed Raspbmc. I wanted to use this cheap little gadget as a media center, filling some of the holes in my existing home entertainment setup. One of the things I … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-72","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-linux","category-raspberry-pi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/techblog.vindvejr.dk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/techblog.vindvejr.dk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/techblog.vindvejr.dk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techblog.vindvejr.dk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techblog.vindvejr.dk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=72"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/techblog.vindvejr.dk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":77,"href":"https:\/\/techblog.vindvejr.dk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72\/revisions\/77"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/techblog.vindvejr.dk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=72"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techblog.vindvejr.dk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=72"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techblog.vindvejr.dk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=72"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}