Blu-ray player with WMA Lossless or similar support?

[cirrus18]

I use my Sony BDP-S370 and an external hard drive to play CDs which I have copied to it in WAV format. Most of the time this works fine but for some orchestral CDs, instead of the music flowing seamlessly from track to track there is a slight gap or a pause/jump.
This is a very annoying phenomenon which negates the convenience of having all of my CDs on hard drive.

This seemingly is a common problem when ripping a CD into WAV. I have tried several different ripping programs to no avail.

Searching the Internet, it seems that quite a few people have this problem and the only way to resolve it seemingly is to rip the CD into a lossless audio file.
I tried this myself by ripping a CD into WMA lossless and found it definitely works, tracks play fine on my computer without any problems.

Lossless audio is not supported by mine or any of the new Sony's Blu-ray players and though I have been searching I can't find any other makes that do. I was hoping that someone on this forum knows of a Blu-ray player that does support lossless audio files and I would be very grateful for the information.

 

[dante01]

I use my Sony BDP-S370 and an external hard drive to play CDs which I have copied to it in WAV format. Most of the time this works fine but for some orchestral CDs, instead of the music flowing seamlessly from track to track there is a slight gap or a pause/jump.
This is a very annoying phenomenon which negates the convenience of having all of my CDs on hard drive.

This seemingly is a common problem when ripping a CD into WAV. I have tried several different ripping programs to no avail.

Searching the Internet, it seems that quite a few people have this problem and the only way to resolve it seemingly is to rip the CD into a lossless audio file.
I tried this myself by ripping a CD into WMA lossless and found it definitely works, tracks play fine on my computer without any problems.

Lossless audio is not supported by mine or any of the new Sony's Blu-ray players and though I have been searching I can't find any other makes that do. I was hoping that someone on this forum knows of a Blu-ray player that does support lossless audio files and I would be very grateful for the information.

Some player do, but it is usually limited to FLAC files. Not sure what kind of budget you have and this may be a bit pricey for you, but OPPO players support FLAC.

The PS3 can play WAV lossless files.

 

[cirrus18]

I have been searching the Internet and I think I have answered my own question.

Pioneer have brought out some new models 2 Advanced Blu-ray 3D players complete our line-up - Pioneer Europe and the BDP-LX 55 will I think, 'do everything that I want.

Hopefully, if I wait until next year the price will drop a little because at the moment it's a little bit too expensive for me.

 

[Kilian]

I wonder if the gap/pause between tracks could be related to how the files are organised and indexed on the HDD or the size of the HDD.

There is no confirmed report here or on AVS that the new Pioneer players support WMA Lossless. Support for FLAC is reported but you have to rename it to mp3. They do support NTFS formatted HDD but do not even display the track number or title being played. Avoid them until the bugs have been corrected.

Some websites such as Linn and 2L offer HD audio file downloads as FLAC so it's the preferred format to have in a BDP. 2L also has some free FLAC and stereo WAV 24/96 on their test bench.

 

[cirrus18]

I wonder if the gap/pause between tracks could be related to how the files are organised and indexed on the HDD or the size of the HDD.

There is no confirmed report here or on AVS that the new Pioneer players support WMA Lossless. Support for FLAC is reported but you have to rename it to mp3. They do support NTFS formatted HDD but do not even display the track number or title being played. Avoid them until the bugs have been corrected.

Some websites such as Linn and 2L offer HD audio file downloads as FLAC so it's the preferred format to have in a BDP. 2L also has some free FLAC and stereo WAV 24/96 on their test bench.

The gap/pause between tracks is definitely caused by how the files are organised and indexed on the hard disk drive. For instance, if I rip a symphony concert CD to wav, a CD which only has 2 tracks indicated when played on a CD player, it appears on the hard disk as 15 tracks. All these tracks shouldn't be there because now, I get a pause between tracks, instead of the music flowing seamlessly.

I have ripped this CD into FLAC and it worked just fine on my computer, without any gaps. Incidentally, from what I have been reading, FLAC is a version of MP3 but in a lossless format.

I'm definitely going to wait before buying one of these players because I've found that in the past, when something new like this comes out there are always bugs in the programming. Also, if it follows the usual pattern of these things, in time the price should drop.
Many thanks for the other information.

 

[Kilian]

No idea what the issue is with CD ripping resulting in more tracks since I don't do it but some CDs have sub-tracks and a symphony CD with only two tracks sounds a bit odd (I listen to classical). Maybe worth checking the ripping programs.

WAV files can be easily stitched back together if they were split up inappropriately. It's just copy and paste in Nero's Wave Editor. No re-encoding is needed so it's quick to do. Any audio editing program should do it. Not a permanent solution if you rip a lot of CDs but an easy workaround in the meantime until you have a BDP that plays FLAC.