I’ve been looking at Lidarr for when I finish transferring my media server to a new system this month, what I am unsure is how difficult it would be to downgrade my 650 FLAC album library down to 320kbps.
It was great locally, but now most of my listening is remote via Plex (Plexamp/Symfonium) and I have found 320kbps albums to be more seamless than FLAC for my usecase with little difference in quality.
I have yet to add my music library to any of my family members accounts as I am unsure how they would listen to it without plexamp and I’m still considering their options.
The main thing is I was hoping Lidarr could get me a downgraded copy to replace all my library with, does anyone have any experience in this matter?
I know that Radarr/Sonarr don’t like downgrading versions automatically.
Lidarr should be able to do that, in your Profile settings put 320 as a higher priority than flac in the upgrade until section, that’ll replace flac with mp3 as it finds it
If you’re having trouble streaming flac with one person I can’t imagine having multiple people streaming mp3 is going to be any better though, if it’s bandwidth you’ll run into the same thing otherwise if it’s hardware, better to find out why it’s not seamless and fix it.
My upload is 50mbps and I wouldn’t say I have issue streaming it, it’s that it isn’t as instant for the next song on Australian Broadband, more like +1s.
Setting transcode defaults don’t save any time either, the main consideration is that my family don’t have good internet and 320kbps would just be more efficient as it really doesn’t sound any better for 3x the size.
In that case it might be worth just playing around with and increasing the Advanced -> Caching settings in plexamp, with 50mbps upload there really shouldn’t be a delay
That’s likely down to your ISPs peering. A 50mbps upload can handle flac with ease, before I had fibre I had 30mbps up and streamed flacs over Plex at work all the time with no issues. Have you checked your Plex amp settings? It’s supposed to cache a few songs, so there shouldn’t be any noticeable gap in song playback