Conversion of SACD

Do you know where I can find an example SACD file?

Well, it works here. What version of SoundConverter are you using?

Version 1.4.4.

Tested with ubuntu 11.10 and soundconverter 1.4.4, and converting was OK.
This propably related to an older version of GStreamer.
I don't think I can do anything more for your problem.

This is a new 10.04 LTS install with newest gstreamer. Don't think this is the problem. Are there other required software packages that you have that I may be lacking?

I've all the gstreamer plugins installed.
You can try to upgrade to a more recent soundconverter.
Also, version 1.4.4 doesn't like folders with spaces.

I installed ubuntu restricted extras, all of the gstreamer plugins I could find, compiled and installed SoundConverter 1.5.4 from source - I still cannot convert this type of SACD FLAC to mp3. Playback of this type of file and conversion of other types of FLACs still works fine.

Aha! A small breakthrough...

It helped to change the resample rate to 44 kHz in the preferences menu - this seemed to work fine.

I also tried 48 kHz and this worked fine one file at a time, but froze up my machine each time I opened an entire folder. I tried 72 kHz - this resulted in GStreamer error when creating pipeline could not link audioconvertX to lameX. At 96 kHz i got the same error with different values for X.

My conclusion is this: when converting this type of FLAC you must select resample, and then the resampling rate must be kept under 72 kHz.

I will set this question to solved, but I am a little disappointed that SoundConverter can't keep the native sampling rate for this type of file.

Thanks for your help.

I know that this discussion has been closed for a while now, but I'm having the same problem (on ubuntu 13.04) trying to convert 24bit/96kHz flac files to mp3 (or any other format). The suggestion of resampling to a lower frequency doesn't solve it, though. In my case, soundconverter doesn't freeze up my system, but rather just spits out empty files and it displays the dialog saying "GStreamer encountered a general stream error."

Any suggestions?

The maximum sampling rate for mp3 is 48KHz. You have to resample it.
Do you have a small sample file available ?

This issues does still exist. I don't think the problem is on the output side, as I choose MP3 and resample to 44.1khz, but it still fails. The input file is 24bit and 96khz.

Today I had similar problems in Ubuntu 13.10 - GStreamer general stream errors.

I was trying to convert FLAC files at various bit rates - some would convert, some would not.

Turns out pulling the latest source and compiling it fixed the problem.

I don't know if this will help with the SACD / DSD file, but it's worth a try.

I encountered the problem on Ubuntu 14.04.
Sampling rate does not matter, but gsteamer fails decoding the 24bit FLAC files regardless of the sampling rate.