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Topic: Converting SACD (or DSD) to WAV without pops (Read 1203 times) previous topic - next topic
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Converting SACD (or DSD) to WAV without pops

I've been fighting this fight for years now, and am baffled that no one has properly addressed this in all the years this has been happening.

It seems the SACD plug-in has a glaring bug in that it fails to handle track transitions properly.  It seems to have been resolved for the playback - but not for file conversion.

I'm under the impression that some workaround was implemented to avoid the pop on the playback - but because conversion deals with each individual track, it continues to have the glaring bug that drops a bunch of garbage audio in the form of a pop at the end or beginning of a track, instead of properly doing the conversion.  Which is quite an annoyance to people that don't want to live with clicks and pops every time a track change occurs.

I've wasted away many hours upon hours over the years trying to find a method of file conversion that avoids this dreaded problem - but keep coming up empty.  It seems that foobar is the only game in town when it comes to DSD to WAV conversion for free, and it continues to be woefully inadequate to those that don't like errors. 

To me, it seems a simple workaround could be to deal with the conversion in a single pass for the entire album - remove the track transition, remove the problem.  I have found a way to extract an album as a single .dff file - but that does me little good, because foobar still treats it as a series of tracks, and will insist on doing the file conversion on the tracks as a result.

For the love of god, can someone please either fix this bug that is years old, or come up with a method of file conversion from dff to wav that doesn't suffer from this error?  Perhaps an option in foobar to treat a file as a file, instead of as a series of tracks, so I can do a single file conversion on the single dff file to a single wav, and finally get away from this stupid bug that has cost me hours and hours of valuable time I will never get back!

Re: Converting SACD (or DSD) to WAV without pops

Reply #1 –
I have found a workaround.  I basically have to fool foobar into doing what I want it to do.

Here is how to extract a full album SACD to a full .wav file, using foobar, no pops between tracks.

First, use sacd_extract gui to extract your album to a full dff file.  This is done using the option to output as Philips DSDIFF (Edit Master) file.  You'll want to pick multichannel or stereo - depending on what you're trying to extract - I extract multichannel.

The problem with dragging the dff file that is extracted into foobar is it automatically, for your convenience, splits it out into tracks in the track list, whether or not that is what you want!  So - if you uninstall the SACD plug-in, when you try to drag it into the track list, it doesn't recognize the tracks, and brings it into the list as a single file.  It won't play....but it's in the track list, as a single file.

Now, you can reinstall the SACD plug-in, foobar restarts, and the tracklist of a single file still exists - with the plug-in installed that can play or convert it.

So now right click on the single file, convert - and voila!  You can convert the entire album to a single file.  No pops between tracks!


A bit of a process - but since no one can be bothered to program this in a way that works right, it's the only way I've found to extract SACD to .wav without pops between tracks.

Re: Converting SACD (or DSD) to WAV without pops

Reply #2 –
One caveat - if the resulting .wav file will be longer than the file size limit for a .wav file, instead of foobar actually doing the sensible thing of notifying you of this, it will just stop creating the file once it gets to the limit, and give you an incomplete file!

If you're doing multichannel at a high sample rate, you'll want to go to .w64 rather than .wav.

Re: Converting SACD (or DSD) to WAV without pops

Reply #3 –
I experienced similar frustration with DSD conversion, so in the end I decided to simply extract .dsf tracks from the .iso and compress them with wavpack.
This is convenient because it not only reduces file sizes, but also allows native playback in DoP mode with supported hardware.

Re: Converting SACD (or DSD) to WAV without pops

Reply #4 –
With foobar2000 and foo_input_sacd 1.3.7 you can avoid clicks between tracks when converting from DSD to PCM by forcing converter to use only 1 (one) thread (File->Preferences->Advanced->Tools->Converter->Thread count. Also this can be set individually for custom converter's presets) AND set PCM samplerate in foo_input_sacd settings to 44100 or 88200 (176400 and 352800 can still produce clicks). If resampler in DSP is used on conversion, it is needed to check "Don't reset DSP between tracks".
Also there are ways to do perfectly gapless conversion of DSD to PCM without using foo_input_sacd at all (and for free too).