Subsonic Forum

I'm trying to find the best combination of audio quality and pause-free streaming. What transcoding options have you guys gone with that have given optimal results?

All my transcodings for music are set to the default.

Step 1: ffmpeg -i %s -f wav -
Step 2: lame -b %b - -

Most of my music library is already Mp3 so there is no transcoding required. Unlike video transcoding, music transcoding doesn't hammer the CPU as much and should, I did say "should", not be a big performance factor. The biggest issues with streaming to your phone are going to be your upload speed from the server and the quality of the 3g connection.

It's mostly the 3g connection. It gets spotty in certain parts of town. I'm on an Evo with Sprit service and live in LA. However, when I go to work, there are patches of poor coverage so I'm trying to work around it as best I can.

Go into the Settings on the Android app. Increase the cache size. I have mine at 5gb. Set songs to preload to unlimited. This way you'll build up an internal library of commonly played music on the phone itself. If you have a playlist you like, you can even preload it over Wifi at home before leaving. I have an EVO on Sprint also and since the phone has gained in popularity the bandwidth has slowly dwindled as the network is no longer able to keep up with the demand. I used to get over 1 - 1.5 M download speeds consistently when I first got the phone (the day it came out), but now 512kbps is considered a good connection.

I set it to unlimited while at home on my wifi with the server, I probably queue up about 100 songs or so, then drop back to a preload of 10.

That'll save you battery too.

I'm more interested in the streaming settings. Even setting the stream to 128 over 3g can be problematic in areas. I'm experimenting with 128 and 64 ogg but I was hoping that folks had success playing with the transcoding options.

The transcoding only affects the load on the CPU of the server and determine the file type and quality of the data stream. Some users have suggested that if the carrier is throttling the data stream, using ssl may improve throughput. Other users have suggested that 64 bit oog is a good choice for getting reasonably good quality at a very low bit rate. I experimented with it briefly and found it to be acceptable if bandwidth was an issue.

128kbps works great for me over 3G. My area is completely covered by 3G and I only have issues when I'm in a basement or elevator of a large building.