• After 15+ years, we've made a big change: Android Forums is now Early Bird Club. Learn more here.

Help Can't play HD audio tracks?

CrackedLCD

CrackedLCD

Well-Known Member
I'm generally happy with my Turbo but I keep finding little things that are a step back from my old HTC Droid DNA. One of those is its inability to play "HD" audio tracks that I've copied over from my PC. I've tried playing them in the stock Google Play Music app (which sucks all around), Amazon's player and even the Apollo app and none of them work unless it's a 44.1 kHz/16 bit track. It doesn't matter what format the audio is in, it just won't play anything that's sampled at 88, 96 kHz or higher.

Now, it's not a HUGE deal since those types of audio tracks aren't exactly going to sound any different than a standard mp3 on this phone since it's got such a weak audio section. But I was looking to copy some stuff just out of convenience instead of manually resampling each track, which is time consuming.

Is there some software solution that will allow me to at least listen to the tracks with high sample rates? Or am I just stuck with subpar hardware? I guess I just assumed if the HTC played those tracks fine that all Android devices would, but that does not appear to be the case.
 
Thanks for the audio player suggestions, I'll be trying them all out tonight. Hopefully I can get another 15 day trial with PowerAmp now that I have a new phone. I tried it out back in the Gingerbread days and it was too much for my wimpy phone to handle back then.

doogald said:
Right, just saying that maybe it's not worth collecting any more of them...
Click to expand...

I completely understand the logic, and I've done the double blind ABX trials myself. With my hearing and my consumer grade equipment there is no real difference between a "CD rip" 44.1 kHz/16-bit and something from HD Tracks in 88 or 192 khz/24-bit. The reason I am using some of those tracks at all is because I CAN tell a difference between them and the compressed mp3s that people like Amazon and Google Play sell. Even at 320 kbps. I'm willing to pay a bit more in some circumstances for a digital lossless download because it's the closest I can get to a "downloadable CD". If there was a major retailer offering 44.1/16 FLAC rips of music I'd be happy with that, but there are none. Or even if Amazon or Google were to switch to AAC, that'd work for me. But my hearing is definitely good enough (I'm able to pick ~80% correct in blind tests using modern era music) to hear the deficiencies of the mp3 format when using headphones, which is how I consume a good 80% of my music.

The thing about a digital download is once you have it, you can never go up in quality, only down. A re-code of an mp3 will never sound as good as the original, which never will sound as good as the CD or lossless version. If you start with a CD rip (or an HD Tracks lossless version) you can compress it down more and lose less quality. If I have no other choice I won't mind, it's just kind of a hassle to get things just the way I like them. I'd much rather be lazy and just have the player do it on the fly or play it native, like my HTC did.
 
Update: Happily all three recommended apps will play the high-res tracks, so that solves that problem. Thanks! Neutron is especially interesting and it confirms that the hardware is 44.1/16 bit capable only, so there's resampling going on. I'm going to put it on the Droid DNA later and see if it's also doing that or if it can actually play higher res stuff. (Edit: it up/down samples everything to 48 kHz!)
 
CrackedLCD said:
Update: Happily all three recommended apps will play the high-res tracks, so that solves that problem. Thanks! Neutron is especially interesting and it confirms that the hardware is 44.1/16 bit capable only, so there's resampling going on. I'm going to put it on the Droid DNA later and see if it's also doing that or if it can actually play higher res stuff. (Edit: it up/down samples everything to 48 kHz!)
Click to expand...

I think just about all phones will be 44.1kHz/48kHz/16bit maximum with their DACs. Same with most portable media players. There are some portable media players available that are HD audio capable with no down sampling. Sony makes a HD Walkman.

Apple sells AAC music, but you can't buy and download it directly to your Android, you must have a PC or Mac with iTunes and then transfer it. I can buy music at 44.1kHz/16bit FLAC, but whether that's available or not does depend on what country/territory you're in, but on the other hand HD Tracks is not available to me. This is all because of music industry and RIAA licensing restrictions.

I'll just leave this here...a present from China.
astley.jpg
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom