Lossless streaming to PS3 - Lessons Learnt

[PJPro]

I've spent the last day or so sorting out lossless streaming of audio from my PC to my PS3. To do this I have been using EAC, TVersity and WinAmp on Vista. I've had a few issues along the way (which I've solved) so I thought I'd post them into a thread so others could benefit from what I have learnt along the way.

[Edit - 01/05/2009]

I no longer use TVersity for streaming to the PS3. See this thread for my new approach.

[End Edit]

[Edit - 05/07/2008]

Been playing with this for a few weeks now. New issues are being found but old issues are being sorted!

The versions of software I am using are....

ApplicationVersion
TVersity0.9.11.4
Exact Audio Copy0.99 prebeta 4
Foobar20000.9.5.3
FLAC1.2.1b

[End Edit]

[Edit - 05/07/2008]

EAC - Rippin issues with last track on CD
I posed a question to this forum regarding sync errors / suspicious position at the end of the last track of a CD when using EAC. I was getting this quite a lot i.e. every other CD. I didn't get an answer, so had a trawl around the web.

It seems that this is related to incorrect drive configuration within EAC and specifically with the "Overread into Lead-In and Lead-Out" option. I turned this off and have not experienced the issue since. It appears that my CD drive does not support this feature. Yours may. If you see the error a lot, try turning the "Overread into Lead-In and Lead-Out" option off to see if it fixes it.

[End Edit]

Installation and configuration of EAC
EAC or Exact Audio Copy allows you to create bit perfect rips of your CDs. There is none better!

I used these instructions to install and configure EAC. No issues.

[Edit - 05/07/2008]

Due to issues with incomplete playback of tracks on PS3 and being unable to see the track length on TVersity, I strongly recommend that the following arguments be used within EAC to pass to the external FLAC encoder:

-5 -V -T "ARTIST=%a" -T "TITLE=%t" -T "ALBUM=%g" -T "DATE=%y" -T "TRACKNUMBER=%n" -T "GENRE=%m" %s --ignore-chunk-sizes -o %d

It should be noted that the first argument relates to file compression. 5 is seen by many as the optimum compression ratio in terms of the size of file and the time it takes for the compression to complete. But you can use any value between 1 and 8 where 1 is the least compression and 8 is the most.

To change the arguments in EAC do the following.
1) Start the EAC application.
1) Click "EAC | Compression Options" menu items. The compression options tabbed dialog appears.
2) Click "External Compression" tab. The external compression controls are viewable.
3) Edit the string in the "Additional command-line options:" textbox.

[End Edit]

Installation and configuration of TVersity
Media server which will take FLAC files and transcode them into a format more palatable to the PS3. In fact, it seems to transcode them to PCM format.

I used these instructions to install and configure TVersity. No issues.

The author claims that these instructions removes many of the issues associated with a standard install of TVersity which relate, in particular, to the codec pack which comes with TVersity. It seems these issues are associated with video streaming primarily and, as yet, I haven't tried any. So if you're having issues, it might be worth giving them a whirl.

TVersity Media Library refresh
Issue - You place a couple of files into your folder structure and ask TVersity to refresh and it takes an age to do so.

If you take a look under the sharing tab in Tversity you will see in the left hand pane a number of feeds. Click each one in turn and delete all the video and audion feeds except your own ones which reside under Home | Media.

It seems that everytime you hit refresh, TVersity goes off to the web and downloads a load of tat from the internet. This tat is held under

Crogram FilesTVersityMedia Serverdatadownload

I have read reports of several gigs of data being held in here.

This link will take you to google. The link you want will be first in the returned results. This is a must read!

Once you have removed these superfluous feeds from TVersity a media library refresh takes seconds.

Incomplete playback of track on PS3
Issue: when you attempt to play some streamed tracks on your PS3 the playback ends before the track has finished.

Symptoms: The track will be listed on the PS3 as being 9:59"59"" long. Browsing the TVersity library through TVersity on your PC will show that the track length is not specified. The track plays perfectly on your PC (TVersity and WinAmp)

It seems this has something to do with the tags within the FLAC file being incorrect...yes EAC has introduced an error during ripping! What you need to do is download and install FooBar and get it to convert the dodgy track into another FLAC file. You'll notice that the file is bigger than the one produced by EAC.

Replace the old file with this new file and refresh the TVersity library. You'll find the issue is now fixed! The double check is that the file length is specified both on the PS3 and within TVersity.

I'm not at together sure what is going on here. Not all files are affected. For me, FooBar was the only application which would sort it. I tried WinAmp and Flac.exe without success. I'm hoping one of the file format gurus on this forum will have an explanation.

See this thread for more information.

Download FooBar from here.

[Edit - 05/07/2008]

This should no longer occur if you are using the arguments I recommend for EAC (see above).

[End Edit]

TVersity and playlists
Issue: You cannot generate playlists in TVersity.

To get round this I downloaded WinAmp to use as a media organiser. So, you create a playlist in WinAmp. You save this playlist to a folder. You then add this folder to Home | Media under the sharing tab within TVersity.

Bob's your uncle. Playlists in TVersity which can be streamed to your PS3.

I downloaded WinAmp from here.

Can't restart TVersity from Start Menu or Desktop Shortcut
Issue: if you close TVersity and then restart it, you get a warning that another instance of the application is already running. The application then exits. You are unable to access the application.

The simple work around is to open the Windows Task Manager and select the Processes tab. Scroll down until you find the TVersity.exe process. Right click on it and select End Process Tree from the context menu. Windows will pop up a dialog seeking confirmation. Click the End Process Tree button. You will now find that you can start TVersity without issue.

An even simpler workaround is to avoid using the Start Menu or Desktop Shortcut once you have closed TVersity. If you take a gander at the System Tray (far right of Taskbar next to clock) you'll find a TVersity icon. Click this and TVersity opens without issue.

[Edit - 05/07/2008]

PS3 cannot see TVersity Media Server
So your PC is turned on and TVersity Media Server is running. You turn on your PS3, navigate to audio and expect to see the TVersity icon. It's not there. You do a search for media servers. None are found? Workaround - restart TVersity media server and icon appears on PS3.

So it appears that the TVersity Media Server will only allow itself to be found by the PS3 if the meida server is started after the PS3. I am hoping that this has been resolved by the latest release candidate for TVersity.

[End Edit]

Well, that's it. If I find anything more, I'll update the original post.

Cheers.

 

[PJPro]

Small update to include a further workaround to the issue relating to starting TVersity from the start menu or desktop shortcut.

 

[PJPro]

Seem to have encountered an insurmountable issue!!!!! Have been banging my head against ot for a couple of nights now.

The issue relates to the duration of the ripped .flac track. If when a track has been ripped and added to TVersity, TVersity does not show a length for the track, the track is guaranteed not to work when streamed to the PS3...the track finishes before it reaches the end.

This actually happens quite a lot. The simple work around is to create a new flac file from the old flac file using foobar....and until now this has worked. However, I seem to have found a file which this does not for...Oasis - Heathen Chemistry - Better Man.

I've tried reripping this file, coding it from one format to another using foobar, uisng flac.exe directly and examining the file metadata using metaflac. It seems whatever I do I cannot get TVersity to display the duration and I don't know why!!!!!

Anyone got any ideas?

 

[PJPro]

Have joined the TVersity forum and posted a thread here.

 

[madeinstein]

PJPro.. what's the advantage of TVersity over Windows Media Player DNLA server?

I had an attempt a while ago at WMP and TVersity and WMP setup seemed to be much simpler.. I've never managed to setup TVersity properly.. I didn't try lossless music files though..

 

[madeinstein]

And one more thing.. I'm now looking at this as a final solution to this as I don't want to have my PC running when listening to music..

Buffalo LinkStation Live

 

[fr0g]

Thought I would give this a try feeling bored...
All looks good, and PS3 sees files and reckons they are PCM... but then when I try to play, it waits and tells me "data type not supported"...

I dont really need it, so I havent had much of a play, but womdered if you knew this one.

 

[PJPro]

OK. Starting to get a bit further into this.

I used metaflac to query the flac file metadata after EAC has converted the .wav to .flac and then after running foobar to convert the .flac to .flac.

It appears EAC places a number fo seek points in the metadata. Whereas foobar removes them. Not really needed apparently. Have tried messing about with metaflac to see if I can tweak the data so that TVersity will show the track length without any success.

What I cannot understand is why this is so hard. I believe the track length is calculated by dividing the number of samples by the sample rate per second. But for some reason TVersity cannot sort this out for this single track.

It's a real pain in the preverbial. After all I've got to O (Oasis) in my music collection only to find that my solution will not work in all instances. Damn, damn, damn!

It seems the only way to get anything to work is to code it yourself! Unfortunately, I'm above all that now.

fr0g: no I haven't seen that error. Are you using the candidate release version 1.0.0.0? I'm still on the old version. I'll look into it tomorrow. Incidently, know of a lossless format I can use as an alternative to flac for this one single file?

madeinstein: I want to use Tversity cos it will allow me to store my music in a compressed lossless format and still be able to stream it to my PS3 via transcoding on the fly.

 

[fr0g]

PJPro:
fr0g: no I haven't seen that error. Are you using the candidate release version 1.0.0.0? I'm still on the old version. I'll look into it tomorrow. Incidently, know of a lossless format I can use as an alternative to flac for this one single file?

I would be tempted to leave it as WAV and sod the tags just for one file. I have never used the others... but look here in the Hydrogen Audio Wiki for an idea...

 

[PJPro]

It's been a long, sorry saga. But rather than be beaten, I decided to go for a lossless format other than flac for this one track (Better Man by Oasis off the album Heathen Chemistry). Decided to go for WMA lossless as this is supported by TVersity.

Firstly tried reripping the cd and compressing the file using EAC. It reckoned it had done the job but no .wma file actually produced. So I downloaded dBpoweramp and the codecs it needed and produced the wma file.

Opened the wma file in foobar2000 and added the tags. A quick playback comparison between flac, wma lossless and wav on the PC through SB Xfi Xtreme Gamer sound card, Beresford DAC and Grado SR80s confirmed equal sound quality (as I expected).

So, loaded the file into the TVersity media library and hey presto I could now see the correct length of the file 38:02 or 38 minutes and 2 seconds. Little bit annoyed as for some reason TVersity (and the PS3) can't order wma files by track.....so Better Man (the last track on the album) appeared first in the list. Hohum. Never mind. Just pleased to see the track length.

Rushed down stairs to try it out on the PS3. After 4 minutes or so the track cut out but kept playing???? Damn! Feeling a benny coming on. Rushed upstairs to the PC. Same with the .wav file. After 4 minutes, nothing????? Tried the CD. The same. What the hell is going on?

It then dawned on me that I couldn't actually remember such a long track on the album. Tried fast forwarding through the silence until I hit a hidden track on the end! Those clever yobbos (I'm being nice here) had hidden a track on the CD.

When playing a CD, Better Man would finish and unless you sat there through 25 minutes of silence, you'd never realise the extra bit on the end. With ripping of course, I could instantly tell how big the entire track was and assumed that it was music all the way through!

So, downloaded Audacity (a wav editor) and snipped out the silence. Used foobar2000 to convert my 9 minute long wav to flac and placed the new much shorter flac file into the TVersity media library. Refreshed the library and hurrah the flac file length was now displayed and was correct!!!!!!!

It's only taken me about 20 hours to sort that bug*er out and, to be honest, I don't really rate that track much either. However, it feels good to have triumphed! My rerip of my music library can now commence with renewed confidence.

Hhhhmmm. Mike Oldfield. Don't rate him much either!

 

[fr0g]

PJPro:It's been a long, sorry saga. But rather than be beaten, I decided to go for a lossless format other than flac for this one track (Better Man by Oasis off the album Heathen Chemistry). Decided to go for WMA lossless as this is supported by TVersity.

Firstly tried reripping the cd and compressing the file using EAC. It reckoned it had done the job but no .wma file actually produced. So I downloaded dBpoweramp and the codecs it needed and produced the wma file.

Opened the wma file in foobar2000 and added the tags. A quick playback comparison between flac, wma lossless and wav on the PC through SB Xfi Xtreme Gamer sound card, Beresford DAC and Grado SR80s confirmed equal sound quality (as I expected).

So, loaded the file into the TVersity media library and hey presto I could now see the correct length of the file 38:02 or 38 minutes and 2 seconds. Little bit annoyed as for some reason TVersity (and the PS3) can't order wma files by track.....so Better Man (the last track on the album) appeared first in the list. Hohum. Never mind. Just pleased to see the track length.

Rushed down stairs to try it out on the PS3. After 4 minutes or so the track cut out but kept playing???? Damn! Feeling a benny coming on. Rushed upstairs to the PC. Same with the .wav file. After 4 minutes, nothing????? Tried the CD. The same. What the hell is going on?

It then dawned on me that I couldn't actually remember such a long track on the album. Tried fast forwarding through the silence until I hit a hidden track on the end! Those clever yobbos (I'm being nice here) had hidden a track on the CD.

When playing a CD, Better Man would finish and unless you sat there through 25 minutes of silence, you'd never realise the extra bit on the end. With ripping of course, I could instantly tell how big the entire track was and assumed that it was music all the way through!

So, downloaded Audacity (a wav editor) and snipped out the silence. Used foobar2000 to convert my 9 minute long wav to flac and placed the new much shorter flac file into the TVersity media library. Refreshed the library and hurrah the flac file length was now displayed and was correct!!!!!!!

It's only taken me about 20 hours to sort that bug*er out and, to be honest, I don't really rate that track much either. However, it feels good to have triumphed! My rerip of my music library can now commence with renewed confidence.

Hhhhmmm. Mike Oldfield. Don't rate him much either!

Hidden tracks are indeed a menace to streamers... It was cool at first, now its just feckin pointless and annoying.

 

[PJPro]

Couldn't agree more. However, if I am to salvage something positive, it has caused me to learn a little about the tools available and flac codec.

 

[PJPro]

OK. Have updated the OP to include new lessons or revised postion after a bit of time spent trying to sort things out.

Incomplete playback of track on PS3:

It seems that this is due to an issue with incorrect/differing chunk sizes in the original .wav. My workaround was to re-encode the .flac coming out of EAC using foobar. This fixed the issue of incomlete playback of the track in PS3 and enabled TVersity to display the correct length of track.

I was not sure why this worked but suspected that it ws due to different arguments being used in foobar to EAC. This turns out to be the case. Therefore, I have revised the advice given with EAC to use the following arguments

-5 -V -T "ARTIST=%a" -T "TITLE=%t" -T "ALBUM=%g" -T "DATE=%y" -T "TRACKNUMBER=%n" -T "GENRE=%m" %s --ignore-chunk-sizes -o %d

With these arguments the issue has gone away.

There is still the issue with secret tracks. I will add a section on secret tracks at a later date.

New Issue : Rippin issues with last track on CD.

I posed a question to this forum regarding sync errors / suspicious position at the end of the last track of a CD when using EAC. I was getting this quite a lot i.e. every other CD. I didn't get an answer, so had a trawl around the web.

It seems that this is related incorrect drive configuration within EAC and specifically with the "Overread into Lead-In and Lead-Out" option. I turned this off and have not experienced the issue since. It appears that my CD drive does not support this feature. Anyway I have updated the OP to include something about this.

New Issue : PS3 cannot see TVersity Media Server

So your PC is turned on and TVersity Media Server is running. You turn on your PS3, navigate to audio and expect to see the TVersity icon. It's not there. You do a search for media servers. None are found? Workaround - restart TVersity media server and icon appears on PS3.

Oh. Updated OP to specify software versions.

 

[PJPro]

fr0g:[snip]... but then when I try to play, it waits and tells me "data type not supported"...[snip]
fr0g, sounds like a issue with the codec to me. Did you follow the instructions above? I know you have FLAC installed.....but seems like TVersity can't find it.

 

[fr0g]

PJPro:fr0g:[snip]... but then when I try to play, it waits and tells me "data type not supported"...[snip]
fr0g, sounds like a issue with the codec to me. Did you follow the instructions above? I know you have FLAC installed.....but seems like TVersity can't find it.

Not sure. FLAC is defintely installed !

Looking at the log in TVersity, it tells me it is transcoding, but the PS3 is having none of it.

Its not a biggee. To be honest, I was trying to get a cheapy pinnacle soundbridge (kitchen with computer speakers, which is used for radio, and music while I cook!) working with FLACs, its just the PS3 is easier to test on

 

[Anonymous]

Thought I'd have a bash at this but been struggling. Keep getting an error message when trying to play the streamed audio. PS3 sees PCM tracks but won't play them:

"The folder could not be accessed. This content may have been deleted from the media server."

Don't really understand it. Probably done something really stupid. From the log it seems like TVersity is streaming the flac as a wav file but for some reason the PS3 won't play it.

Any clues?

 

[PJPro]

TVersity is a tricky swine. It's not worth the hassle now that foo_upnp is available. I've updated the OP to link to a thread I wrote some time ago, bringing it to the attention of the forum.

foo_upnp is a piece of cake and has a single button you press which configure for use with the PS3. One downside. With the version I have, it doesn't stream the album art.....or at least I can't get it working.

 

[Anonymous]

Hey PJPro.

Beforehand I should mention that I'm from Portugal so pardon my english. I'm a passionate for music and everything that concerns it. Being so, the way I listen to music i.e., reproduce it, has always been of my concern but with recent developments on the way we do it have somewhat changed the paradigm from what used to be done to achieve great sound. I've been reading your posts about computer based music, and thanks a lot to bring up this issue, you're the first I can find that is thinking specifically about this. I recently bought a PS3 with the intention of using it as a multimedia center in my living room. I already have my music collection ready form the PC and my intention is to stream it from my office (where the PC is) to my living room (where the PS3 is). I've learned with your post about going around windows music processing with foobar - my question in this particular issue is: my PC is a laptop with no audio card although it has an SPDIF out wich I normally use to connect it to a Yamaha RXV-550 receiver. The sound is acceptable, by I wouldn't mind (surely!) improving it.

The question I would like to put you is:

1 - Right now I have the receiver at the office and I plug it straight to the PC via SPDIF. Does the trick with foobar, changing the PC OUT also work without any sound card or DAC? Does this improve the sound, leting the music reach the receiver unprocessed by Windows (Vista)? The Yamaha RXV-550 doesn't have any DAC's for digital media, I suppose.

2 - In a few months (new house -> marriage!) the plan is: PS3 at the living room and the PC at the office to stream the music wirelessly to the living room. I should mention that the receiver, of course, will be at the living room, connected to the PS3 through an optical cable. I am thinking of getting a DAC (DacMagic from Cambridge Audio) and use it as a processor for digital music. I assume the path would be: PC -> PS3 -> DacMagic -> Receiver. The questions are: does wireless streaming hurt the music quality (more jitter)? Would it be better in the PS3's hard drive and then trough the DAC to the receiver? Is it still possible to avoid the Windows processing by sending bit perfect streams wirelessly with Foobar? Or does this only work with a sound card? I mean, when reading your posts, when you mentioned streaming to PS3 was it wireless? Where do you use the DAC? After PS3 and before the receiver?

Hope I'm not being too complicated in my doubts. I would really apreciate it if you would care to share some thoughts.