Question
On iOS, why can the Jellyfin app play Opus music fine, but Finamp cannot without forcing transcoding to AAC in Finamp settings?
Details
I recently lossy-encoded my FLAC music library to Opus format and created a new library for it on my Jellyfin server. I started trying to use the Jellyfin iOS app to play music from the library, which works fine with one caveat: if the phone screen locks, the next track in the queue will not play. This seems to be related to a limitation in a library used for the Jellyfin iOS app (expo).
The only workaround I am aware of to continue playing music from a Jellyfin server on iOS after the screen locks is to use the Finamp app instead, which is a purpose-built music player app for Jellyfin servers. But it will not play Opus tracks on iOS, apparently because iOS doesn’t natively support Opus except when it’s in a CAF container, which is non-standard and exceedingly rare. I have to set Finamp to transcode all music to AAC in order to play the tracks.
Why can the Jellyfin app play Opus tracks on iOS without issue, but Finamp can’t?
Are you sure the Jellyfin app isn’t transcoding? What do logs say
No, in fact I bet it does. I’ll check the logs.
I wish Finamp would detect when a locally-incompatible audio format is used and transcode automatically.
I believe it can
Finamp settings>transcoding>enable
Oh it definitely does. That’s how I’m able to play my opus library using Finamp.
What I mean is that the Finamp features seems to transcode everything to AAC if you turn it on, rather than being more intelligent about when it needs to in order to play the file format locally. I wouldn’t want it transcoding MP3s, for example.
Ohhh
I wonder if this is possibly something they’ve improved in the experimental? Or possibly this is something worth putting a ticket in over. Finamp hasn’t been around that long so improving the intelligence of transcoding may just be something they’ve not gotten to yet
