How to play .dsf files

Dennis845

Great looking player, THANKS! I read about Strawberry on itsfoss.com and had to try it because the author said it plays DSD files (e.g. .dsf). However, that capability isn't listed under your "Features", and indeed, when I try to add a dsf file this is the error:
"File /home/xyz/Music/love.dsf is not recognized as a valid audio file."

I think you're using gstreamer and dpkg shows libav is loaded:
gstreamer1.0-libav:amd64 1.16.2-2 amd64 ffmpeg plugin for GStreamer

That file (and many others) play fine as DoP with this ffmpeg command line:
ffmpeg -hide_banner -i /home/xyz/Music/love.dsf -c:a pcm_s24le -f alsa plughw:1,3

What am I doing wrong? Strawberry has exactly what I need to replace foobar2000 (under Wine of course) as a native player. Please assume I'm an idiot who knows just enough to be dangerous.

Thanks for any help.

(Environment is Linux Mint 20.1)

jonas

@dennis845
It was supported previously (but not natively) because we were using our own fork of taglib with DSDIFF/DSF support, but when a new official taglib release came along I decided to just use that instead of keeping our own version due to fact that most distros compiled with the system taglib instead of our version anyway, so it was only really used on macOS and Windows and users just filed issues because of it. My impression is that the DSDIFF/DSF support in gstreamer was a bit unstable too.

Ton

Hi Jonas, you haven't heard from me for a long time. Because I was very satisfied. But now that I can indeed not play my dsd files anymore….that is terrible. What can I, we do, to get it working again?

jonas

@ton
I agree. But the only way to get it added back is to keep our own fork of taglib, and unfortunately it's too much work for me right now and too few contributors.

Ton

Jonas, I did send them this message. "Hello, suddenly my Strawberry Musicplayer can't read DSDIFF/DSF files.
Strawberry tells me taglib doesn't support it anymore.
Can you please make it work again?"

Ton

Answer from taglib,
Hi Ton,

As far as I know, DSDIFF/DSF was never part of an official TagLib release.

It was merged into master (2018-10-27, d71398c9), but it was later
removed (2019-09-12, 074f30e3) with the commit message

Remove DSF and DSDIFF from master to a feature branch

These can be merged back into master once they're in a more mature state.

@Scott: Can you tell us what exactly were the problems which led to
this removal?

The code still exists in the taglib2 branch. It is not difficult to
include support for a new tag format in a project which is using
TagLib, that code does not have to be part of TagLib, so the
Strawberry Musicplayer could add DSF support to its source code. I did
this myself for https://invent.kde.org/multimedia/kid3/, but I used
another implementation from https://github.com/pekingduck/metadsf
(2015-03-11, 18687eb2), and I had to add a few fixes based on bug
reports from users, so an alternative to the stuff in the taglib2
branch could be the src/plugins/taglibmetadata/taglibext/dsf folder in
the Kid3 sources.

Jonas, was this helpful?