Roon currently does not support ISO files, nor would there appear to be any plans to do so.
Several ISO to DSF converters exist and roon does support DSF. However ISO files are normally compressed by DST so when uncompressed/converted to DSF there is a significant jump in file size. Although disc storage is very cheap these days there are many scenarios where the increased disc storage is a considerable inconvenience or just impractical. One example is storage on a work or travel laptop where the options may be limited. Consequently there are several discussions/feature requests for ISO support.
Roon does not support Wavpack (.WV) either. However Wavpack 5 now supports DSF compression. So this is a feature request for DSF compression via Wavpack. The details can be found here:
I’ll second that. A lot of 32-bit music comes in wavepack format. It’s not that much larger than FLAC actually for the same music quality. Now, if I unpack it into .WAV or AIF then it becomes large: roughly double.
Hi, folks. Could you update us on the plans for this?
Storing uncompressed DSD files is a space hog. Plus requires a much higher bandwidth capacity to stream.
More and more hi-res tracks are now being distributed as the .wv or an uncompressed DSD (DSF or DFF), compressible losslessly to .wv using WavPack 5.
With WavPack 5 compression I’m getting .wv at around 46% of the original .dsf tracks. That’s less than half! In fact, on par with 24/192 FLAC, while possessing a higher resolution.
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If you want the best possible quality you should never convert audio files
converting audio files to smaller other formats doesn’t make your music collection sounding better
The best is to rip your CD’s in the WAV format.
WAV is also the format were 99.9% of all audio formats in the studio’s are recorded
WAV is bigger, yes that’s true, but harddisk space is very cheap, and if you want the best
possible sound quality, don’t use lossy formats like WV.
Yes that’s right WV is like MP3 a lossy format,.
WAV and FLAC is not, but WAV sounds even better than FLAC, so WAV is the way to go
That WV supports also “lossless” function, doesn’t mean that it’s users are going to use it
There is already a norm for high-resolution audio for many years: WAV and FLAC
So what reason is there to have another format? WV doesn’t make your music sound better…
We already have WAV and FLAC for PCM encoded material, and DSF for DSD audio.
There is absolutely no need for another format, the only one I can think about is if you don’t have enough money to buy a bigger harddisk? and you are willing to sacrifice quality for getting more music on that harddisk, instead of buying another or bigger one…
Well, I get your point here Aneta. But it so happens I don’t have a lot of money. Hard drive space is valuable to me. WV’s support for lossless compression means that software that can decompress this during playback can give me DSD using approximately half the space (2 channel). No loss of sound quality, half the storage space used – what’s not to like about it? When I play back WV compressed files in for instance Foobar2000, it gives me the original DSD through my DAC. You might not be aware of this? Roon supporting WV will enable a lot of users to compress their DSD files to almost half size. Of course, if you only have a few albums in this format, it won’t matter much. I have several thousands. So for me, it’s actually a very big deal.
I believe WAV is certainly not the “way to go” unless you are already invested in this format and don’t relish the thought of converting to another format. Both FLAC and WAV are lossless formats; both retain the original quality, both sound the same. However, WAV has very limited support for metadata (tagging) unlike FLAC.
Your use case seems perfectly valid to me. Others seem to agree with you. As it happens I had a different use case in mind. It’s business travel. Maybe it wasn’t very clear in the OP.
I can see this being great for such a case as yours. I don’t have a large SACD collection, but I can still see this as being very useful for budget minded folks (like me ).
I’m not using WavPack nor am I likely to use WavPack in the future, but looking at their webpage it does seem that there should not be any reason why Roon couldn’t include support for it. It’s open source, multi platform and avoiding patented stuff.
Then again, if only a few people are interested in it, it might not be worth the effort unless everything worth doing is already done I actually have no idea how big of an effort it would be, but I assume it’s not a big thing.
Interesting article. I don’t think it is widely understood that SACD was routinely (losslessly) compressed. But I don’t see DST compression as a practical option. Foobar for example will playback a DST compressed ISO but roon will not playback an ISO, compressed or otherwise. What roon will playback is DFF or DSF.
Must admit I am surprised by the sudden interest in this thread. I was actually the OP almost exactly a year a go. The first response was 8 months later so I assumed there was no interest at all, and just use other players on the road.
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I actually have no idea how big of an effort it would be, but I assume it’s not a big thing.
pretty please!