Support for Wavpack (.wv) DSF compression

About half of our users with gear capable of greater than 1x, not playing MQA.

We support HQ Player because early in our lifespan, a large group of our users wanted HQ Player support. Nowadays, while that group has grown, it is a tiny minority of our overall user base.

2 Likes

Quite a large number I think you will find, myself being amongst that number.
Everything to dsd512.

Have you actually tried it yourself?

1 Like

Personally, I find HQPlayer’s upsampling and modulators to be far superior to what Roon offers….but maybe that is just me.

Either way, it still real time up-sampling.

Yah, what Joel said… Whether you prefer HQ Player, no reason to store upsampled content on disk. Roon (alone or with HQ Player) can do it in realtime.

1 Like

I was responding to @AceRimmer regarding their response to @jfx regarding Roon’s upsampling ability versus HQPlayer’s. In other words, a different topic than if someone should or should not upsample to disk vs. real-time.

Yup, I still have a bunch of SACD → DSD64 in WavPack 5 from years ago.

Wish Roon could play them…

4 Likes

Voted. This would halve the size of my music folder.

2 Likes

I can appreciate the challenges that Danny lays out. It is not an insignificant undertaking, could slow down or complicate some processes, etc.
That said, I would really appreciate this feature. I appreciate being able to play DSF instead of having to convert to PCM but once you get into 100+ SACDs you start wishing you could compress.
While I’m sure the average user is not playing DSF, I think you’ll find many of the dedicated “power users” early adopters are. I’d much rather pay for another year of membership than buy another drive.

2 Likes

I, too, would like to see support for WavPack. I am very glad that Roon supports DSF and does not require me to convert to PCM, but I would like to be able to use the lossless compression that WavPack provides. Many of us would save an awful lot of hard drive space, and we would be buying and consuming fewer hard drives.

I’ve added a vote for this feature. Please be sure that you have done so, if you want to see WavPack support. Thanks.

3 Likes

Personally I don’t care much for SACDs, but I have lots of PCM albums compressed in WavPack. It’s rather annoying that the software I pay for can’t even see them, while a freeware player like FB2k had no trouble playing that content years ago.

Please consider implementing this soon, I really don’t feel like converting all this stuff again.

1 Like

I’d love to see wavpack support for Roon

3 Likes

While both Roon and HQPlayer can upsample in real-time, there exists other software that performs upsampling “offline”, and the results must be stored on disk. In my case that software is PGGB (pggb.io) and I store 24-bit/768Khz PCM files compressed in Wavpack.

I don’t think that “well then, don’t use PGGB and use Roon or HQP for upsampling instead” is a reasonable thing (e.g. for Roon devs) to say. Clearly, I have my reasons for using PGGB offline upsampling instead of HQP real-time upsampling (for offline files, at least), just as some people have their reasons for using HQP upsampling instead of Roon upsampling.

Getting into any of those reasons would not only be off-topic, but should also not be necessary: adding support for a file format can’t be some kind of mammoth task, especially a file format that many people use, and that many free softwares (such as Foobar2000) support out-of-the-box.

Of course, Foobar2000 does not do what Roon does, and I continue so far to use Roon even though it doesn’t support Wavpack, but I would certainly like to see support added. This topic has my vote, but I think that “easy” tasks should need less votes to actually be worked on than “difficult” tasks. If a feature will take very little effort to implement, even if a few of your users are asking for it, why not just get it done and over with?

4 Likes

Currently, I installed roon for a test phase.
So far I see and tested, roon doesn’t support wv compression files.
My whole music library is upsampled to 24/768k with PGGB OFFLINE (pggb.io).

If posible please implement this soon, so that I can use roon.

2 Likes

https://www.remastero.com/pggb.html

PGGB files upscaled to 32 bit/768 kHz definitely sound better than through the Chord M Scaler, especially since PGGB can add the EQ during processing, no headroom management required.

1 Like

wavpack support would be nice, especially for .dsf files.

1 Like