Turning off transcoding for internet radio

[dutchcomputerkid]

I've come to notice that all radio streams are always transcoded to MP3 128. Can't seem to find an option to turn that off, as it's only making the quality worse then whatever's being streamed. Most internet radio's are higher bitrate or Opus audio, which sounds a LOT better.

[acroyear]

The stream from the station is not transcoded in any way by the Subsonic server. It is streamed direct from the source (which is why some station sources now no longer play that way, like TunedIn).

Most internet radio is 128k, because bandwidth is expensive and stations are having a hard time keeping up with costs as it is due to the labels and ASCP constantly begging for more money that isn't there.

[demodulated]

Some internet radio stations have different stream URLs corresponding to different bitrates. Make sure the URL you are using corresponds to the quality you want.

[dutchcomputerkid]

Would be cool if it did that, yes.

Yet, if you look in the logs its always the same thing:

Code: Select all

   InternetRadioStreamController   Starting converter for radio: /var/subsonic/transcode/ffmpeg -i [URL] -f mp3 -v 0 -

All streams are always transcoded, and most of my streams are high bitrate OGG, or 192kbit MP3s and higher. But this ffmpeg transcode is not in the transcode lists, so is there just no way to disable this easily?

[acroyear]

AH - transcoded within the main UI. That I hadn't paid attention to. If I'm actually at my browser, I just use the radio's official page. The mp3 streaming probably goes back to when the UI used a flash program to be the player rather than html5 and other stream formats (like OGG) weren't supported.

When the stream is passed to an app via the API, it isn't transcoded in any way - Apps get the url as-is to do with as they want.

So...yeah, probably can't be helped right now.