[REQ] 24bit Input Support

[Barough]

Please add 24bit input support to CT. This is a feature that's really missing and would elevate the potential of CT a LOT.

24bit/44.1/48/96/192kHz to 16bit/44.1kHz

[radorn]

You maybe wondering why you don't get a reply after all these months. I'll try to explain.

The reason is you've completely missed the purpose of this program. This is not a general purpose audio converter. This is a tool to work with CDDA rips. It is meant to perform certain specific tasks on audio files extracted from Compact Disc Digital Audio discs which follow the so-called "Red-Book" specification that describes the format, and it has features that are specific to deal with that, which are also meaningless for any other type of audio, including those formats you mention. While much 44.1kHz/16bit available for download online comes from CDs, and may work with CUETools if it was extracted and stored properly (ie: a proper full-disc rip), not nearly all of it comes from CDs or follows all the applicable details of the Red-Book spec. These kinds of files aren't really meant to be used with CUETools, though they may work to a certain extent.

One of the main features of CUETools is it's ability to check CD rips against two online databases of CD extraction verification data which are AccurateRip and CUEToolsDB, populated with reports sent to them when people rip their own CDs with tools like CUERipper or Exact Audio Copy, which can contribute to at these DBs. By design, these databases do not and cannot contain any data for any "HD" audio formats, and it would be pointless to even try to expand them to do so since these are meant to address certain, characteristics of the CD format that are completely unrelated to any later HD format, physical or digital, which makes the whole idea pointless. This is not to say an HD audio verification database couldn't be built, but it's design would be very different than either AR or CTDB, and it's usefulness would be different.

While I'm not the maintainer of this software, I'm quite confident telling you that CUETools probably/surely won't ever support anything other than Compact Disc audio rips. I'll be really surprised and puzzled if that ever happens.

[DarkVoyage]

I can only expand above in a specific moment that CueTools has a frame-length encoding behavior, which means that any audio file that has length not dividable by full frame sample length would be padded during encoding with empty samples, which is absolute nonsense in case of hi-res files and not what you expect to get. So CueTools is not a tool you should use not only for Hi-Res, but for any material not strictly coming from a CD or mastered for CD. The best recommendation would be to use foobar2000 as a converter and player for too.