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.
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Downgrading FLAC? Are you insane?
I’d go for MP3 V0 instead of 320kbps. Most will agree that the quality is the same but the size difference is quite noticable. I mean as long as you’re going lossy, you might as well be efficient with it and not throw away space.
I tried Lidarr but gave up on it and I’m just using Beets right now for organizing and converting my stuff. I don’t download music so often and a bit manual work isn’t an issue for me. I use FDK AAC and encode everything to VBR4 which is then available in Navidrome, but keep the FLACs of course.
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Thanks for that. I buy often from Bandcamp and they present lots of formats to download. Space is a concern for me, so I don’t go FLAC but wasn’t really sure what would be the best lossy format. I’ll start giving V0 a shot and see if my bad ears can even tell a difference.
There’s barely a chance an excellent set of ears would hear the difference…but nevertheless, a set of excellent ears would go for FLAC anyway.
I can’t hear anything above 15KHz and in all of the ABX tests I ever did I couldn’t really hear a difference, at least with the best equipment and headphones I’ve had, so even V0 is an overkill for me but still much more efficient than FLACs
Being an audiophile is a rich people’s game, the one I’d like to taste but wouldn’t like to get into. The sole reason I keep FLACs is for archival purpose of music because lossy formats barely have any archival value, and you can always transcode FLACs into some better lossy format that might release in the future.
I agree. V0 > 320. dBpowerwamp works great
Thanks for that. I buy often from Bandcamp and they present lots of formats to download. Space is a concern for me, so I don’t go FLAC but wasn’t really sure what would be the best lossy format. I’ll start giving V0 a shot and see if my bad ears can even tell a difference.
Why even live if you can’t listen to FLAC? Just upgrade your network.
I suggest you convert them to AAC with Apple’s excellent QAAC encoder instead. fre:ac can do it just fine once you add the encoder. Much better and more modern format than MP3, and still universally playable.
Downloading now, thank you
I just use ffmpeg to re-encode flac files to 320kbps MP3s
for %A in (*.flac) do ffmpeg -i “%~nA.flac” -b:a 320k “%~nA.mp3”
320 is fine, I know technically the difference between FLAC and 320 is hard to show, but I think the tracks I have in FLAC are encoded better or something, they just sound better overall.
I think this might be what you’re looking for: https://stackoverflow.com/a/42874649
You can download ffmpeg here: https://ffmpeg.org/download.html
beetshas a convert plugin, plusbeetsin general is great. Would recommend. Typically storage is relatively cheap so instead of getting rid of your FLACs, why not transcode them all to a separate folder/library, and point your server at that and not the FLAC library?Just use LAME for that
I wish I had just gone with 320kbps in the beginning, it’s not like I own any audio equipment that is sufficient in quality.
Edit: I also know about Tdarr which reencodes video libraries.
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.
Plexamp automatically downgrade the bitrate of your music when streaming via cellular. By default it uses an OPUS codec with 128kbps bitrate. If you still want to convert your FLACs into mp3 you can check Foobar2000, it’s free and has a lot of options for converting music files.
Thank you for the foobar2000 recommendation, I’m just trying to make my streaming more efficient and instant, OPUS 128kbps was fine but it would still take a second or two between tracks.
You’re welcome mate!
um just enable transcoding on your server. no need to downgrade.
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.
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
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
