Whipper is a Python 2.7 CD-DA ripper, fork of the morituri project (CDDA ripper for *nix systems aiming for accuracy over speed). It improves morituri which development seems to have halted merging old ignored pull requests, improving it with bugfixes and new features.

Whipper is developed and tested only on Linux distributions but may work fine on other *nix OSes too.

This tutorial is divided in two sections, the first one is intended for those who have DACs that support DSD and want to configure Foobar to play and output DSD. The second section (scroll down) is for those who either have PCM only DACs or for some reason want their DSD files to be converted to PCM.

Let's talk about digital transports for a bit.

Most of us I'm sure remember those days when the only way to get digital data to an outboard DAC was through a CD transport. Although we can still resort to a CD reader, I suspect that many of us here have gone mostly into the computer audio realm with data on hard drives or flash/SSD devices. Thankfully gone are the days when the data being read off the CD could be inaccurate and interpolation may be needed in realtime, or be susceptible to mechanical failures of CD drive mechanisms (though hard drive failures and need for backups present another challenge).

I have shown that bit-perfect data can be transferred and played back without any concern off a USB asynchronous interface (eg. the various Mac and Windows software players and laptops). While I have the Squeezebox Receiver still on hand, let us have a look at the effect of using different transport devices with S/PDIF interfaces objectively.