I wanted to document how I was able to successfully rip SACDs to enjoy DSD files for playback on my hifi system. I only own around 10 SACDs so I didn’t see the need to invest in an SACD transport. But I do own the following:
- MacOS Computer that serves music using Roon
- PS Audio DirectStream DAC (built on a DSD model)
- Oppo BDP-103 Bluray player
Only do this if you plan to use these files legally—meaning you’re not going to share them online once extracted. I offer no warranty about the sources of these scripts that make this work and have not written them. Do this at your own risk.
There are pundits that say that DSD sounds better than PCM digital audio. I did this to test the theory for myself. This makes sense only if the recording was recorded as DSD natively.
Many sources point to this page by Sonore with a Java based tool to extract DSD. The idea is that you install something on your Oppo and this will talk to the player over the network to do the job.
This did not work for me. Instead, I used this command-line tool. Before you get to work, know that you have to prepare a USB Flash drive (in Windows FAT format) with three files before you get to ripping.
Download the AutoScript files here which was posted originally in 2016 by a user named ted_b. Make a folder on the drive called AutoScript then copy these three files:
- AutoScript
- AutoScript.TSS
- sacd_extract
Insert the USB flash drive into the front of your Oppo and it should spit out the tray to load an SACD.
Next, you’ll need the IP address of your Oppo player. This works with the BDP-103 and BDP-105. You can hook up the player to a TV and get the IP address after using the wireless dongle or connecting your player via Ethernet to your network. I didn’t have a TV in my computer room so I used a network sniffer to obtain the IP address.
The SACD-ripper software is a command line tool. I installed mine in my home folder and ran the script from there. I inserted my IP address for the player with port 2002 and then used a number of flags outlined in the FAQ that comes with the tool. I wanted stereo files and wanted the files in a Sony file format I knew would be compatible with my equipment.
My command line execution therefore looked like this:
/Users/jhendron/sacd_extract-0/sacd_extract -i 192.168.1.174:2002 -2 -s -P -CSubstitute your own IP address for your Oppo. If you did not put the executable in your home folder, the lead up to the name of the executable will be different. The easist way to do this is to grab that file and drop it into Terminal from the Finder.
Your albums will be waiting for you in short order in folders named for each one. I then moved these to my Roon directory for ripped music and it indexed them and I was ready to go.