Getting started with SACD ISOs

SACDs are a bit boring to use with mobile devices and media servers. So, it’s interesting to convert them into a modern space saving format without losing any quality.

This guide will show, how to split an SACD ISO into separate tracks in FLAC format.

Command line processing

I found the tool sacd_extract for macOS. It’s easy to run:

sacd_extract -i <inputfile.iso> -m -s

It will extract all tracks into individual files. Unfortunately, it does not support input from <stdin>.

For SACDs it might be important, to use the -m to extract multi-channel tracks. By default, sacd_extract will extract dual channel tracks.

Then a:

dsf2flac -i <inputfile.dsf>

will convert the DSF file into FLAC format.

Graphical User Interface

The — basically very powerful — GUI tool XLD can be used to do the same. But I’ve experienced issues transcoding the ISOs. What renders this tool useless to me.

Todo

Recover the source, where I’ve downloaded sacd_extract and dsf2flac from.