Subsonic Forum

I currently have it set at 128kbps, is there any other settings I can mess with so I can not eat up my data limit?

Well the first step is figuring out what bitrate your plan can afford. If the answer to that is 128kbps, then there are still some things you can do to improve your sound quality.

By default, SS is going to transcode to 128kbps CBR mp3. CBR is inferior to VBR. Previously, I had mine setup to transcode using lame V5 preset (approx. 130kbps VBR). I did this because I was using the web client (bandwidth at work is poor). Now that I've switched to using dsub in an android emulator, I decided for kicks to switch to ogg vorbis using q4 (approx. 128kbps VBR). I did both of these using the downsample command in subsonic rather than setting up a separate transcoding (don't ask me why...it just seemed to make more sense for my setup).

[edit]: I'm thinking I answered a different question than you asked. No, bitrate is really the only governor of how much data you will use. If you are really concerned, you will want precache/download stuff while you are on wifi.

Well, I essentially have "unlimited" data with AT&T as I was grandfathered in, but we all know it stops at 3GBs. My friend has his phone setup to my server and he's limited to 2GB. Ideally, we would hardly stream on 4G as many places has Wi-Fi, however going to the gym, around town, and so forth is where we would like to use SubSonic. With that being said, so far I've set my quality down to 128kbps, preload to 1 song, and cache to 100mb(not sure if it matters). For today I've used 350mb (I had it set to unlimited bitrate, but switched it to 128kbps once I hit 300mb), and with Pandora I've used 240mb since April 14th, and that's heavily. Is there something that Pandora does that I won't be able to do to save as much data as possible?

As far as transcoding goes, I don't know the commands whatsoever. At the moment the quality for me is fine, so if need be I can try and do some transcoding to save some data if it gave me good quality and lower data usage.

Also thank you for the quick reply!

gbeezy wrote:Is there something that Pandora does that I won't be able to do to save as much data as possible?

Again, all pandora can do to lower data transfer is encode at a lower bitrate. No idea what they use though...they pulled out of canada a few years back...

Well it looks like SubSonic isn't for me. 128kbps is the lowest I was wanting to go on the bitrate and it just eats up a lot of data.

Are you absolutely sure your server is actually downsampling to 128k? You can check the server logs or examine the files that have been downloaded to your phone and check their bitrate.

[edit]: Oh and btw, it's easy to calculate how much data should be getting used. 128kpbs is approximately 1mb per minute so if you listen for an hour, you should use 60mb or so...

gbeezy wrote:and with Pandora I've used 240mb since April 14th, and that's heavily

Very suspicious of this statement. At 128k, that would only be 4 hours of listening and I'd be surprised if they were using a lower bitrate...

mr_nobody wrote:Are you absolutely sure your server is actually downsampling to 128k? You can check the server logs or examine the files that have been downloaded to your phone and check their bitrate.

[edit]: Oh and btw, it's easy to calculate how much data should be getting used. 128kpbs is approximately 1mb per minute so if you listen for an hour, you should use 60mb or so...

I just changed it in my settings that the server is downsampling to 128k as I searched the forums for the answer.

Is it normal for the player to attempt and connect to the server for ALL of my songs when I trying to shuffle my whole library?

Also is there a way to view the song titles instead of the artist?

Sorry If I'm asking a lot of questions, there's no guides that I can find! I'm also very new to this so thank you for being patient with me!

You never said what app/os your phone is? Android? Iphone? What app? I'm only really familiar with android and specifically dsub...

My apologies I currently use an Android on a Samsung Galaxy S4. Also thank you, you were right it does take 1mb per minute. Just used 10mb in 10minutes. Does it load the whole song each time I click on one? For example If I pick a song I didn't want to pick will it load all of the song, mb wise?

Yeah, once it starts downloading a song, it's going to download the whole thing. How much in advance it loads will depend on the setting in the app to tell it how many songs to load in advance. The default is 3 but you said you changed it to 1.