Airfoil: Bit-perfect playback?

[discursive]

Hello,

Many are the times I've browsed to these forums, though this is my first post.

My question is: Does anyone know whether Airfoil is transparent to the audio output of whatever given app? So, iTunes streaming natively (with "Airtunes") to the Airport Express is bitperfect; would streaming iTunes (or Foobar, suitably configured, or whatever else) through Airfoil also be bitperfect?

That's my question -- I might as well include a little background.

I'm a linux user and I've been using raop_play to stream my flac collection from Amarok to my AEX. The AEX runs to my Benchmark DAC1 via toslink. The difference between this and bitperfect playback using iTunes to stream the same music in Apple Lossless format is stark -- I can pick it every time, blind. (Amarok + raop_play is substantially more bassy, making it a give-away.)

I'm working with a few people trying to get the raop_play code fixed, but that's not going to happen too soon, I fear. So I'm stuck with vmware and, for the time being, iTunes. But iTunes is a total drag -- and I'm sure there are other Windows players I'd much prefer (recommendations for bitperfect playback and configurable metadata will be most appreciated!) I know Airfoil will interface with any Windows app and my Airport, and I know several people here are using it happily; but I wonder if anyone has captured a stream from the AEX sent with Airfoil to compare it with the original file? Has anyone check to see that it's bitperfect?

Apart from the obvious convenience of being able to use other media players, this would also save me from the task of converting my 500Gb+ flac collection to ALAC!

Thanks, &

Happy listening!


edit: In case anyone's interested, the code that reads FLAC can be seen here. The conversion to PCM is happening here. Thanks to Nils, the raop_play project maintainer, for pointing this out to me. Line 382 defines a bunch of pointers, one of which is "pcm_resample".

[jimb0]

Did you get anywhere with this?

[discursively]

Originally Posted by jimb0

Did you get anywhere with this?

Nope. I got a Squeezebox 3! -- It's by far the best thing I've found for my system/listening/life for a long time.

Cheers!
Simon

[blessingx]

Welcome to Head-Fi and I like that your first post is listed second and your second first.

Anyway the SB3 is a great streamer and a pretty good damn DAC for that matter.

[Random Access]

Airfoil on my iMac OSX 10.5.4 is bit-perfect to my 11g Airport Express using optical out to my receiver. Easily confirmed by playing a DTS .wav file with Cog.app.

I have not found a way to get bit-perfect using Airfoil on my PC (Windows XP SP2, SB Audigy 2). My SB audigy seems to insist on resampling when using other programs than iTunes. iTunes gives me bit-perfect playback but no FLAC playback... but then it's not using Airfoil. :P

But I have more testing to do so i'll try from one of the other PCs at home as soon as I get some more time.