I have some dts cd's that I want to import into itunes on a windows pc and then play back on my apple tv 3 (i think its 3, about 9 months old) to listen to through my onkyo amp via hdmi as dts, when I play back I just get white noise.

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I have some dts cd's that I want to import into itunes on a windows pc and then play back on my apple tv 3 (i think its 3, about 9 months old) to listen to through my onkyo amp via hdmi as dts, when I play back I just get white noise.

I have some dts cd's that I want to import into itunes on a windows pc and then play back on my apple tv 3 (i think its 3, about 9 months old) to listen to through my onkyo amp via hdmi as dts, when I play back I just get white noise. I have seen lots of old posts which go on about converting files but am wondering wherher at the current time with the latest versions of itunes and apple tv whether this should by now be a virtual play out of the box solution.

I have tried connecting my atv to the amp by optical cable but that didnt produce anything better and am assuming that a hdmi cable should be able to reproduce everything an optical cable does.

Is this something I should be able to achieve without having to recode the files?

Tracks are imported to itunes as apple lossless, have tried setting the atv audio settings to auto and 16 bit, neither works yet I was told some time ago by an apple rep that the atv shoud be able to handle any type of audio as it just passes it to the amp to decode. I am not stupid but not that technical when it comes to audio and bitrates etc so any explaination would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance for any help

Apple TV (3rd generation)

Posted on Sep 28, 2013 9:50 AM

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Answer 1

Sep 28, 2013 9:54 AM in response to willydoit

Welcome to the Apple Community.

Have you converted to multi-channel AAC, most audio systems cannot play this.

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Answer 2

willydoit Author

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Sep 28, 2013 1:26 PM in response to Winston Churchill

Hi,

The only conversion i have done was to import the disk into itunes with the apple lossless setting, would this have converted it into the format you mention?

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Answer 3

Sep 28, 2013 1:39 PM in response to willydoit

To be honest I'm not sure whether iTunes can convert DTS, but importing anything into ALAC qualifies as a conversion.

Try get info > summary and see what it says there.

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Answer 4

SJB314

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Oct 17, 2013 10:15 AM in response to willydoit

Willy, the procdedure you describe works perfectly for AppleTV G1. In fact, I frequently play DTS music discs ripped to my iTunes library as Apple Lossless (ALAC) and synched to the ATV. What happens is that, as far as iTunes and the ATV are concerned, a conventional stereo 16/44 audio file is being played; however my reciever detects the DTS data stream, and instead of outputting static, it decodes the 5.1 channels correctly. This process parallels the way DTS discs were designed to be played back: a conventional CD player is connceted, via digital out, to a DTS-aware reciever/pre-amp and the two channels of static are recognized as 6 channels of DTS-encoded audio.

However this process will only work if the player (CD, ATV, PC, etc.) sends a "bit-perfect" 16 bit/44.1 khz data stream to the decoding device. In the case of ATV G2 and G3, as has been discussed elsewhere, the unit resmaples all audio - including 16/44 PCM (Redbook CD) - to 16/48. While this is not a big deal for conventional audio CDs, MP3s, and AAC files, it mangles the fragile DTS datastream and renders it undecodable. The resulting static that you hear is just like the static you would hear if you played a DTS CD on a non-DTS capable system.

Sadly, I'm not aware of any easy way around this. You could use a program like Foobar (and the DTS plugin) to convert your DTS CDs to 6-ch .wav or .flac file. From there you could transcode the file to AC-3 and then mux it into a video container that ATV supports. You may need add a dummy video track, for iTunes/AppleTV to be ok with the file, though I'm not sure. This may be a lot of work.

Sorry for the bad news. I wish that the iTunes/ATV ecosystem had better multi-channel audio support.

Steven

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