Subsonic Forum

More than half my library is in FLAC format. I was hoping the web player would be able to play these files without transcoding. Every FLAC that I play just spins and plays maybe the first second or two and then jumps to the next track. If I transcode to Ogg Vorbis using oggenc, I get the same problem. It seems the only thing I can get to reliably play is MP3s. I was hoping the move to an HTML5 based player would allow native playback of FLAC, Ogg Vorbis and Opus files, since the browser supports those formats natively. I have tried both Chrome and Firefox with the same results.

So, nobody knows how to get this working?

Bump...

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But I shouldn't need to use ffmpeg. I DON'T want to transcode. I want the web player to play the native FLAC file.

apastuszak wrote:More than half my library is in FLAC format. I was hoping the web player would be able to play these files without transcoding. Every FLAC that I play just spins and plays maybe the first second or two and then jumps to the next track. If I transcode to Ogg Vorbis using oggenc, I get the same problem. It seems the only thing I can get to reliably play is MP3s. I was hoping the move to an HTML5 based player would allow native playback of FLAC, Ogg Vorbis and Opus files, since the browser supports those formats natively. I have tried both Chrome and Firefox with the same results.

I was able to get my iPhone to play FLAC as WAV by adding a second transcoding command:

Convert from FLAC
Convert to WAV
Step 1: ffmpeg -i %s -map 0:0 -f wav -

Voila!

Note that I don't use the web browser to play my FLAC collection, but I do want it to stream losslessly to my phone when using my phone to be the player on my home LAN. However, now I'm working on making it so when I'm on the road my FLACs still are being sent lossy compressed to MP3 before being played, to conserve bandwidth (and not wait on slow 3G network), because I just tried this and, despite a setting in the iSub app that is supposed to force it to 160kbps over cellular, it still streams at full CD WAV quality (i.e. 1411 kpbs).

grant420 wrote:

apastuszak wrote:More than half my library is in FLAC format. I was hoping the web player would be able to play these files without transcoding. Every FLAC that I play just spins and plays maybe the first second or two and then jumps to the next track. If I transcode to Ogg Vorbis using oggenc, I get the same problem. It seems the only thing I can get to reliably play is MP3s. I was hoping the move to an HTML5 based player would allow native playback of FLAC, Ogg Vorbis and Opus files, since the browser supports those formats natively. I have tried both Chrome and Firefox with the same results.

I was able to get my iPhone to play FLAC as WAV by adding a second transcoding command:

Convert from FLAC
Convert to WAV
Step 1: ffmpeg -i %s -map 0:0 -f wav -

Voila!

Note that I don't use the web browser to play my FLAC collection, but I do want it to stream losslessly to my phone when using my phone to be the player on my home LAN. However, now I'm working on making it so when I'm on the road my FLACs still are being sent lossy compressed to MP3 before being played, to conserve bandwidth (and not wait on slow 3G network), because I just tried this and, despite a setting in the iSub app that is supposed to force it to 160kbps over cellular, it still streams at full CD WAV quality (i.e. 1411 kpbs).

I use AVsub on my iPhone and it has no issue playing FLACs or transcoding. I transcode to AAC 256K.

Yeah, no shit. iSub also has no issue transcoding FLAC to MP3, but you said you wanted to be able to play FLAC losslessly, which I just taught you how to do, at least for external players like iSub

grant420 wrote:Yeah, no shit. iSub also has no issue transcoding FLAC to MP3, but you said you wanted to be able to play FLAC losslessly, which I just taught you how to do, at least for external players like iSub

FLAC is already lossless. Why would I want to convert to WAV?

Will this work with the web player?

apastuszak wrote:

grant420 wrote:Yeah, no shit. iSub also has no issue transcoding FLAC to MP3, but you said you wanted to be able to play FLAC losslessly, which I just taught you how to do, at least for external players like iSub

FLAC is already lossless. Why would I want to convert to WAV?

Will this work with the web player?

To answer your first question: that was my "solution" for playing losslessly at home (since default transcoding take FLAC and convert to MP3), and I didn't know if simply removing FLAC from the list of file extensions in the default transcoder would do what I needed. Also, this might make it even more universally playable on all external apps, say if your home deck is setup to talk to some 'ancient' device that has to have WAV streamed to it.

second, no idea. Do you mean browsing to your SubSonic (on the LAN) IP address and playing content from various devices (i.e. playstation 4) in your home via the website? Why are you using the browser? Forgive my ignorance, I may be using SubSonic in a very limited way - I only stream my home PC's FLAC and MP3 content to my phone and, using iSub, play music on the road in the car over cellular or to various bluetooth-enabled devices in my home (e.g. home audio system, portable bluetooth players, headphones) over WiFi.

grant420 wrote:

apastuszak wrote:

grant420 wrote:Yeah, no shit. iSub also has no issue transcoding FLAC to MP3, but you said you wanted to be able to play FLAC losslessly, which I just taught you how to do, at least for external players like iSub

FLAC is already lossless. Why would I want to convert to WAV?

Will this work with the web player?

To answer your first question: that was my "solution" for playing losslessly at home (since default transcoding take FLAC and convert to MP3), and I didn't know if simply removing FLAC from the list of file extensions in the default transcoder would do what I needed. Also, this might make it even more universally playable on all external apps, say if your home deck is setup to talk to some 'ancient' device that has to have WAV streamed to it.

second, no idea. Do you mean browsing to your SubSonic (on the LAN) IP address and playing content from various devices (i.e. playstation 4) in your home via the website? Why are you using the browser? Forgive my ignorance, I may be using SubSonic in a very limited way - I only stream my home PC's FLAC and MP3 content to my phone and, using iSub, play music on the road in the car over cellular or to various bluetooth-enabled devices in my home (e.g. home audio system, portable bluetooth players, headphones) over WiFi.

In order to play lossless, I just turned off all transcoding. That seemed to work for me.

I use the browser at my desk when I am working.

I like the WAV idea. I need to test that with my Roku and see if it works.

Thanks for the tip!