[LAU] How do i play 24/96 and 24/192 bit files at native rates and verify that it's happening?

[drew Roberts]

On Friday 25 December 2009 17:01:59 Paul Davis wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 25, 2009 at 4:38 PM, Bearcat M. Sandor
>
> <hometheater at feline-soul.com> wrote:
> > sound card: IntelHD
> > alsa version: 2.6.31-r6
> > pulseaudio version: 0.9.19
> > mpd version: 0.15.5
> > disto: gentoo amd64
> > Sound file format: Flac
> >
> > Folks,
> >
> > What i would like to be able to do is to play music files at their
> > native rates. I realize that my sound card's rates begin at 48khz, so
> > 44.1khz files may have to be upsampled in any case. That's not
> > preferable but that's alright.  However, i'd like to be able to play 96
> > khz files and 192 khz files at their respective rates with out resulting
> > to upsampling.  If i have to upsample everything to 192khz to avoid
> > downsampling files to 48 khz i'll do that but it's not ideal.
>
> i can't tell if you're confused or not.

Paul, I think either you misread him a bit or I did.

My quick and dirty read follows:

I think what is basically wants is for the system to determine the one files 
is in format Y and set up HW to match. The another file is determined to be 
format Z and sets up HW to match so that at all times, if possible, what is 
being sent to the card matches what the card is configured for.

It seems he knows this will not be able to happen for 44.1 or below as his 
card only goes down to 48.

Does this seem possibly what is being asked on a re-read?
>
> the hardware is running with a sample rate we can call "HW". you have
> files at a different sample rate, we'll call it Y. At some point,
> something is going to have to convert the data stream that is at Y to
> HW. this has to happen before it hits the hardware. there are lots of
> different bits of software that can do this. the simplest is to rely
> on the audio stack to take care of it. the best, as far as quality
> goes, is to use either sndfile-resample or sox to create a new on-disk
> representation of the data. if you rely on the stack, then do not
> bother asking which part of it is doing the conversion, and don't
> expect to have any control over its quality.
>
> --p

all the best,

drew