[nostroscontento]

I want to report my experience with listening to audio files with Kodi and the SACD ISO support SPIFF 1.0.4 add-on. I anticipate now that the problem is compatibility with multichannel files ... Here is the report:

NVIDIA SHIELD ANDROID TV
SW SHIELD Android TV 8.1.1 (32.7.301.99)
Kodi 18.7 (18.7.200) 2020-06-09
CPU: ARMv8 Processor rev 1 (v81)
Android 9.0.0 API level 28

Files *.dsf (DSD 2channel ) -  Playback is OK!
Files *.dsf (DSD 5channel ) -  Playback works but only in 2-channel stereo.
Files *.ISO SACD 2channel  -  Playback is OK!
Files *.ISO SACD 5channel  -  It doesn't work - High level electronic noise

ISo in the end we can say that the real problem, at the moment, we hope can be overcome, is that of multichannel audio files, both * .dsf (but in stereo 2.0 is OK) and SACD 5.1 audio files.

Hopefully it's a problem that will be resolved with an upcoming update and that there is no hardware incompatibility of the NVIDIA.

[nostroscontento]

I also want to specify that in case of audio-video reproduction (for example, Netflix) of 5.1 multichannel audio, it works perfectly and is processed by my HT Home Theater amplifier.

[ArminiusTux]

Waiting for a stable SACD plugin appears to take longer than expected  - in the mean time DSD enthusiats can look forward to the next minor version of Kodi (v18.8).
Hopefully this update is going to incorporate ffmpeg version 4.3 (or was it 4:3  ), which in turn will bring support for Wavpack v5, which supports lossless compression modes for DSD streams .

WavPack-DSD is as much as a logical choice to compress, store & play DSD audio files as FLAC has become for PCM over the years.

[HeresJohnny]

Sorry to burst your bubble... somewhat...

Waiting for a stable SACD plugin appears to take longer than expected  - in the mean time DSD enthusiats can look forward to the next minor version of Kodi (v18.8).
Hopefully this update is going to incorporate ffmpeg version 4.3

It has already been incorporated into the latest Matrix nightly and I've confirmed it working. Track lengths are off by factor 4 at the moment, though. There don't seem to be any patches to backport the new ffmpeg to Leia at the moment.

I don't want to go into how to best convert your DSD files to WAVPACK, you can read about it HERE. Additional hints not found there:

• Make sure that you've tagged your .dsf source files in Picard with ID3v2.3 and not ID3v2.4 tags if you want them to be automatically imported to the resulting WAVPACK file in APEv2 format.
  
• If you have hi-res art incorporated as tag, you need to use --allow-huge-tags as additional option for your preset in BatchEncoder
  

[HomerJau]

ISo in the end we can say that the real problem, at the moment, we hope can be overcome, is that of multichannel audio files, both * .dsf (but in stereo 2.0 is OK) and SACD 5.1 audio files.

Hopefully multichannel playback will be fixed soon by @spiff . In the Foobar SACD ISO component there’s a preference to play multichannel, I wonder if that’s what’s needed in the Kodi add-on?

[lightsout]

I'm just hoping to play bit perfect FLAC (cd quality) with Kodi on a Shield. I can get it to deliver 44.1khz to my Denon x3500 but Kodi has to be set to 5.1 which sends audio to all speakers.

I can put the AVR into stereo mode but seems that the audio is being processed at that point.

[alik1006]

I am using Kodi 18.8 on Intel NUC/Windows 10 connected to Marantz SR7008 via HDMI.
After adding SAD ISO addon, I was able to play .iso files (many thanks to @spiff) except those containing SACD MCH DSD (getting noise instead).

The solution for that worked for me was using iso2dsd to extract .dsf files, which then Kodi plays perfectly.
However, receiver still gets PCM, so my understanding is that I am getting DoP.

Do I understand correctly that the issue is with windows/intel drivers for HDMI, not Kodi?
If yes, will going to android/linux/coreelec/libreelec/amlogic/anything else solve the problem?
Or my only viable / best solution is to switch to USB?

PS Apologies if this has already been answered, I did try to search and read.

[HeresJohnny]

You seem to be confusing several concepts here. The source is simply decoded to PCM by KODI. KODi has no pass-through capabilities for DSD.

[black_eagle]

There is a newer addon available (I think only for v19 after about the middle of August).  See https://github.com/xbmc/audiodecoder.sacd

[HeresJohnny]

Interesting... it also seems to target the WAVPACK problem that lengths are reported incorrectly. There seems to be no installable version yet, though.

[black_eagle]

Interesting... it also seems to target the WAVPACK problem that lengths are reported incorrectly. There seems to be no installable version yet, though.

/off topic

Yeah, there is actually a PR to fix that issue in the taglib library that Kodi uses but it's not been merged yet and we would need a new release incorporating the fix for it to be added to Kodi.  Wheels turn slowly sometimes......

It could be patched for Windows but that would leave Linux and probably Apple users out in the cold unless they built it from source with the patch applied. 

/on topic

I take it then it's not included with the nightly Windows builds yet then?

[jjd-uk]

The new addon hasn't been pushed to the repo's yet.

Interesting... it also seems to target the WAVPACK problem that lengths are reported incorrectly. There seems to be no installable version yet, though.

I believe it also fixes the issues with multi-channel audio discs.

My understanding is the new addon has been based on SACD Decoder input plugin for foobar2000 so it's function should be identical to what foobar2000 does.

[HeresJohnny]

Partially, at least. I see settings for base and LFE volume adjustment and for FIR filters.

[dabl]

Super happy to see progress on this, thanks for the updates!

[Wanilton]

@alwinus

Was released today, the new audio decoder sacd addon works fine with audio 2.0 and 5.1 using windows 64. But need reinclude tracks in the addon.xml file removed recently, with default addon don´t list any track, only show 2 channels or multichannel items, when reinserting the item, the list is populated fine, appear the number, the artist and the song name (tracklist).

Here link to windows:

http://mirrors.xbmc.org/addons/matrix/au...-0.1.1.zip

I only have this general info in my log:

2020-09-16 18:44:17.323 T:18188    INFO <general>: CFileDirectoryFactory::Create: Addon 'audiodecoder.sacd' support extension '.sacdstream' but creation failed (seems not supported), trying other addons and Kodi
more
INFO <general>: ADDON: Dll Destroyed - SACD ISO support