Subsonic Forum

Does Subsonic stream FLACS as such, or does it have to transcode them first?

It will transcode if playing in the web player as JW player does not support flac. If using external player then its up to you
(settings/transcode).

BKKKPewsey wrote:It will transcode if playing in the web player as JW player does not support flac. If using external player then its up to you (settings/transcode).

Well, this sounds like (FLAC) music to my ears! So you're saying that if I stream to my Subsonic client on my Android phone, then the Subsonic server would not have to do any transcoding, right? Which means that I won't have to invest in a powerful NAS after all!

As far as I'm aware, the transcoding magic happens on the server side, then gets streamed to the device. This accomplishes two things: 1) most mobile devices don't have the horsepower to handle transcoding on the fly and 2) lowers bandwidth usage on the mobile carrier.

FWIW: My Subsonic server is an old Lenovo Think Centre with 2G RAM and a Pentium4 dual-core. That little server gets abused by 6 (or more) users and can handle transcoding on the fly without even flexing. Granted, it's running a headless Linux server OS, but still, having your server transcode is the best-case scenario.

frotzed wrote:As far as I'm aware, the transcoding magic happens on the server side, then gets streamed to the device.

Thanks. The question was whether transcoding can be avoided completely when streaming FLACs, and I guess the answer is yes.