Audiophile: FLAC Support

[Monode]

Hi,

One of my main clients is Audio Note and have one of their all valve systems. Regularly I do photography for them and get to use the DAC 4 or DAC 5 (£10,000 and £36,000 respectfully) with my PC.

I've moved from WinAmp to QCD last summer due to the trully massive jump in quality - you really can hear everything on these systems and QCD is much closer to CD than MP3 and exhibits none of the mid-scoop so common with poorly written MP3 decoding.

Recently we have had several customers contact us talking about digitizing their entire classical and jazz CD collections into lossless format, the most popular being FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) and I was wondering if you had considered creating a plugin for QCD based on this OpenSource technology?

Regards,
Monode :o)

[#The fREaK!]

There is a FLAC input plugin for QCD, but no encoder yet.

[acozz]

There is a FLAC playback (output) plugin for QCD, but no encoder yet.

He means input plugin.

[Toe]

As they said, we've already got a FLAC input plugin, in fact I'm listening to a rip of one of my System of a Down CDs through it as I write this. Check the plugins link at the top of the page. As for an encoder, you should be able to use the generic CLI encoder, but if we're talking audiophile usage here, I wouldn't use anything but EAC (http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/) for ripping the CDs.

[Monode]

Guys,

Thanks for that - I didn't notice the Next page button. All downloaded and installed.

Incidentally, I use CD Copy (www.cdcopy.sk) as it is tooooo basic to know about copy protected disks. I seem to remember it uses Reed-Solomon as CD drives do when reading data. This gives a one in a hundred billion chance of error. SGIs play audio CDs this way and they sound stunning next to a PC drive.

SGI O2 + eBay = £100 CD player that runs UNIX - Sweet!

Regards,
Monode :o)