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High Resolution Audio vs Emby


Richard Branches

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Richard Branches

I've been looking at some info about high resolution audio support on Android and all I've seen is complaints about poor support by the Android driver in this regard, where the driver resamples everything to 48Khz instead of playing the audio in its real resolution even on phones with DACs that support up to 192Khz.

In a previous release of Emby for Android mobile I saw the release notes saying the app was supporting high res on phones that support it, but given the above situation I wonder what the Emby app actually supports in this regard.

One suggestion could be adding the real output the app is giving in the "Stats for nerds" option inside the cog icon in the now playing screen.

Edited by Richard Branches
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Richard Branches

Can you please then move this topic to the feature requests section?

Thanks.

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  • 1 month later...
Richard Branches
On 1/24/2022 at 12:24 PM, Luke said:

Hi, yes we can certainly look at expanding on that information in future updates. thanks.

But what does the app do? is it outputting the real resolution or is it resampling everything to 48 khz as well?.

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On 3/19/2022 at 8:02 PM, Richard Branches said:

But what does the app do? is it outputting the real resolution or is it resampling everything to 48 khz as well?.

We are configuring the player we're embedding to not resample so it should not be, when possible.

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  • 1 year later...
Richard Branches

I bought a FiiO KA1 USB-C DAC for my phone and this is what I found out:

The DAC has an RGB indicator light that changes depending on the format and audio quality:

- Blue: when 44.1Khz and 48Khz is playing. So far so good.

- Yellow: When 88.2Khz and higher are playing, the Emby app on my phone was able to output these qualities. So far so good.

- Green: When native DSD is playing, the Emby app was unable to play or passthrough this format.

- Magenta: This is for FLAC files encoded in MQA, I have a few songs on this format but unfortunately the Emby app passed only the standard quality and I imagine the reason is because the MQA core needs to be implemented in the app in order for this to work, more info here https://www.mqa.co.uk/tag435sdf43te and here https://github.com/purpl3F0x/MQA_identifier/tree/master/gui. Perhaps you can make the app to tell the DAC that the song playing is MQA encoded. An MQA sample is attached here Coldplay - Paradise.flac

I was impressed that the app actually passed through all Hi-Res qualities, however, on the Android TV app the situation is very different, this is the current state:

image.png.d559f199a37cfdfab0660da381216924.png

I hope all this gets implemented in a not so distant future...

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6 hours ago, Richard Branches said:

I bought a FiiO KA1 USB-C DAC for my phone and this is what I found out:

The DAC has an RGB indicator light that changes depending on the format and audio quality:

- Blue: when 44.1Khz and 48Khz is playing. So far so good.

- Yellow: When 88.2Khz and higher are playing, the Emby app on my phone was able to output these qualities. So far so good.

- Green: When native DSD is playing, the Emby app was unable to play or passthrough this format.

- Magenta: This is for FLAC files encoded in MQA, I have a few songs on this format but unfortunately the Emby app passed only the standard quality and I imagine the reason is because the MQA core needs to be implemented in the app in order for this to work, more info here https://www.mqa.co.uk/tag435sdf43te and here https://github.com/purpl3F0x/MQA_identifier/tree/master/gui. Perhaps you can make the app to tell the DAC that the song playing is MQA encoded. An MQA sample is attached here  Coldplay - Paradise.flac 31.91 MB · 0 downloads

I was impressed that the app actually passed through all Hi-Res qualities, however, on the Android TV app the situation is very different, this is the current state:

image.png.d559f199a37cfdfab0660da381216924.png

I hope all this gets implemented in a not so distant future...

Cool thanks for sharing. We are looking into the dsd issue.

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Richard Branches
On 4/20/2023 at 12:14 AM, Luke said:

We are looking into the dsd issue

Make sure the app supports the three DSD available modes:

- DSD converted to PCM.

- DoP (DSD over PCM).

- DSD native.

The "Exclusive USB Audio Access Mode" option for DACs is needed of course for all this to work, which it's already requested here:

 

Thank you.

Edited by Richard Branches
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  • 6 months later...
Richard Branches

Android 14 will supposedly provide support for direct USB DAC playback along with the "bit perfect" playback, therefore, below is the available documentation about it, I hope that you guys take a look at this and implement the API in the Android app, I will be more than happy to test it out with my DAC and provide support once I get a phone with Android 14 of course:

Preferred mixer attributes on USB devices:

https://source.android.com/docs/core/audio/preferred-mixer-attr?hl=en

AudioMixerAttributes:

https://developer.android.com/reference/android/media/AudioMixerAttributes

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