playback of 5.1 DTS audio from .wav file

I thought my setup would playback a couple live concert 5.1 DTS audio .wav files I downloaded. I have the most recent K-lite standard codec pack installed. I have LAV audio set to bitstream all surround formats to my AVR via HDMI from a Win7 PC. I have tried playback using MPC-HC and MusicBee.  All I get is some static sound. Playback of .mkv files containing DTS 5.1 audio using MPC-HC works perfectly using this setup - I get sound from all 6 speakers and my AVR lights up its DTS light. As the files came as .cue/.wav I've even tried extracting individual tracks to .flac with CueTools, but I get the same result.

While I guess this could be an issue with the files, I suspect it's more likely something about how Windows is "seeing" the files. Maybe a codec tweak could fix that? The MediaInfo program that comes with K-lite tells me the format is DTS/6 channels/44.1 KHz, however a couple other audio programs I have installed see the file as only 2 channels. Does Windows somehow interfere with LAV bitstreaming the DTS format sound in either .wav or .flac files (but lets .mkv through ok)?

Does this have anything to do with the option during K-Lite installation that asks about sound output formats? Even though all my sound gets sent to a 5.1 AVR/speaker set up, I've always chosen the option "Same as input" during K-lite installation, but wondered if I should be choosing 5.1.  I figure I want my 2 channel .flac files to only play from L/R speakers since it was made for 2 speakers.  thanks for any help

Easiest way to solve it is to rename the files to .dts. Then players will use LAV Splitter instead of the standard WAV Parser of Windows.

does sound like a good simple solution. so many programs use .wav I'd guess it's a bad idea to mess with how windows handles .wav.

I assume this means that LAV splitter does not handle playback of .flac. Is there a reason one wouldn't want LAV splitter to be involved in .flac playback?

Why do you think that? WAV and FLAC are different formats. LAV gets used for FLAC just fine, unless you install something else with a higher merit that handles it.

Well, I extracted individual tracks (as .flac) from the .cue/.wav files and the resulting .flac gave the same static sound. So if changing .wav to .dts is a method to make LAV splitter handle the renamed file that was previously being handled by Windows, but LAV already handles .flac then just having LAV handle the audio should have worked for the .flac I extracted (unless the .flac's didn't get extracted/compressed correctly).

Renaming the full .wav to .dts worked perfectly. Renaming the .flac's to .dts didn't work. Probably the compression didn't know to keep the format as .dts? Might try extracting to tracks without compression, then rename all the track .wav's to .dts. Or learn how to compress 5.1 using flac command line options that preserve the 6 channel sound.

Thanks for your responses.

You can put practically any format inside WAV, but it isn't very good compatibility wise, because the data often gets handled as if it was uncompressed audio.

You should encode the audio to actual .flac files, so with a FLAC container instead of WAV. Then they will play out-of-the-box.

For now you can use this registry tweak:

Code:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Media Type\Extensions\.flac]
"Source Filter"="{B98D13E7-55DB-4385-A33D-09FD1BA26338}"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Wow6432Node\Media Type\Extensions\.flac]
"Source Filter"="{B98D13E7-55DB-4385-A33D-09FD1BA26338}"


I thought I was encoding the files to .flac when I ran CueTools to split the .cue/.wav into tracks.

What exactly does that registry edit do?

That tweak set LAV Splitter as preferred for handling .flac files.

MediaInfo should be able to show you what kind of container format the file uses.