Thanks again @anupc. I’ve asked someone in my company who is Japanese to look at the e-onkyo site and so far it is HD downloads, similar to NativeDSD. They are–to my knowledge as of yet–not offering older DSD disks like, for example, the MoFi collection, in digital format for download. So, to my knowledge the only solution for these is to rip via old Blue-ray player. If anyone determines otherwise I am interested!
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I haven’t yet seen a streaming service that provides surround feeds. And for something like Spem In Alium (40 vocal parts!), surround versus stereo can make a real difference.
Also, some of us have obscure musical tastes. Mine range from Hildegarde von Bingen (10th C) to “new music” to filk (sic). Not every recording is available for streaming (though some of the niche items have been showing up on Bandcamp in recent years). Few of those are SACD, but the only way to get some of this included in the jukebox is either a changer or to rip.
And, yeah, given just how many discs are in my collection, I’m not really excited about paying again to access material I’ve already licensed.
This video may be helpful to your efforts (first posted 9/24/23):
Cheers
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This is exactly what I did and it works great once you set it up. I got the Sony unit on ebay for $50. I captured to a mac and had to fiddle with the software to and permissions to get it to work but once I got it going I did a couple hundred SACDs in a few days.
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Related question: What’s the process for ripping blu-ray audio? Same tools? Or should a blu-ray PC drive under Linux be able to handle them?
Ditto for DVD-Audio. The PC drive can access it, showing an AUDIO_TS directory containing .BUP, IFO, AOB, and .VOB files, and a VIDEO_TS directory with a similar mix. Do I just treat that as a DVD with choice between several versions of the audio, or is there a way to render it as something Kodi will recognize as music?
Rip Blu-ray | QuadraphonicQuad Home Audio Forum
You will need two things:
- a program to decrypt the Bluray (or AudioDVD). I use AnyDVD
- A program to rip the BluRay. I use DVD Audio Extractor
Many thanks!
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Just further confirmation that this works, using a Sony S390 purchased off eBay. (Not quite your $10 bargain, but not unreasonable and included remote.) I’ve offloaded .DSF files for both high-res-stereo and surround tracks, with album/file names (and hopefully other metadata) being picked up automagically. Runs quite fast across my wired GBE LAN.
BTW, the front-panel USB port on this machine works fine for the AutoScript thumb drive; much more convenient than the rear port when the player is stacked in my home-entertainment center.
It’s a lot of data, of course. The two-album disc I mentioned comes to 3.2G of stereo and 9.5G of surround.
It Is Rumored that lossless compression from DSF is possible via the WavPack tool. I haven’t tried it; I know nothing about how well or poorly that format integrates with jukebox apps such as KoDi… but it looks worth investigating.
I have one disc (Paul Winter’s Chaos And Creation In The Back Yard, on EMI) which has declined to be copied off this way. It’s marked as being a Copy Control disc, which I presume is why. CC discs are not Red Book Standard CDs, with changes such as bad error correcting codes intended to confuse most non-firmware attempts to read them. I can respect that (though of course all it blocks is exact copying, not recording a playback), but it’s a slight nuisance. There are reasons CC was only in use from 2001-2006 or so…
Another disc (first disk of Sequentia’s The Rheingold Curse) gave me similar errors but repeated tries (slightly shifting the disc each time for paranoia’s sake) eventually persuaded it to cooperate. As far as I can tell, there’s no provision for SACDExtractGUI recognizing or being told that this is a multi-disc set and having it adjust track numbers appropriately; I’m doing that manually. (For this one album I’m also translating track names manually – the metadata is apparently in Icelandic and I’d rather have English.)
There is a related ripping question that I need to investigate.
I have some CDs, particularly some short-run stuff burned by the artists, which the normal rippers don’t like the format of; I also have some discs with bad sectors. The typical audio player has fairly sophisticated error recovery, whereas PC drives emphasize bit-accurate transfer… so the best way to rip those troublesome discs (or at least the damaged tracks) would seem to be to play them and re-record the resulting audio; close enough for practical purposes.
But I’m wondering whether this Sony player, in its normal streaming mode, could be persuaded to transfer the repaired audio directly as digital rather than bouncing it through analog. That would obviously be more convenient and remove a source of distortion/noise.
If someone’s tried that, I’d appreciate confirmation that it works. Otherwise folks will have to wait for me to report on that next phase.