New to Subsonic, some questions about playing FLAC files

[dhilberg]

First of all, as the title suggests, I'm new to Subsonic. I have been using foobar2000 to play my music collection (all FLAC) on the desktop PC, and I've been happy with it, but it has some limitations and drawbacks (particularly in the album art department). I've become more interested in playing music on my Android phone, and long story short, that's what led me to Subsonic.

I only recently stumbled across Subsonic just last week, and happily donated once I realized its potential. However, I'm beginning to have reservations about the donation as it seems actual FLAC support is limited.

I want to use the Subsonic web interface to play my FLAC files on my local PC, but the web player won't play them without being transcoded into mp3 files (which I don't want, as this defeats the purpose of having music in a lossless format). When I turn off MP3 transcoding, the FLAC files show up as FLAC in the web player (instead of MP3), but when I play them the seekbar shows it "fast-forwarding" through each track: No actual sound is produced.

I tried the Jukebox player, which does seem to actually play the FLAC files directly, but there are no track skip controls, nor a seekbar: Not very useful.

foobar2000 has absolutely no problems playing all my FLAC files, and includes all controls that you would expect to find on an audio player (including a seekbar and skip controls). However, Subsonic trumps foobar2000 for everything else, which is why I would rather use it than foobar2000. Am I missing something, or is this just the way it is with Subsonic? I really don't want to have to switch between two different music players to get my desired functionality, especially since I've already paid for Subsonic.

I did quite a bit of searching on this subject, but never came up with a real solution. How can I play FLAC files in the Subsonic web interface, on my local PC, without having to transcode to MP3 or use the Jukebox player which lacks sufficient controls? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

[bushman4]

Unfortunately Subsonic uses JWPlayer as the embedded player in its web interface and it does not have native FLAC support.

You can do what you want by using an External Player, but that means you would be using the web interface for playlist management and then the content would be streamed to another application (foobar is one of the ones that works I think) on your desktop.

Do you really have computer speakers that you can hear the difference between 320kbps MP3 files and native flac files though? I can see on a true stereo system with proper crossover separation and great speakers, but on a computer?

(I know those two are not mutually exclusive, but AFAIK I don't know many people who will go digital out to a good A/D converter to a good system which is probably the most critical part since the A/D on most sound cards is crap...)

HTH,

Glenn

[dhilberg]

Thanks Glenn for your informative reply.

You make a good point. No, I cannot hear the difference between flac and 320kbps mp3 files, either on my computer speakers (which I admit are not very good) or my headphones. I appreciate you bringing that up.

After thinking about your reply for a while, I suppose I was being overly concerned about playing flac files natively. I think I was just overcome with emotion after finding what I thought was the perfect audio solution, only to further find out that it was playing them as mp3. However, once I understood that they were being transcoded into 320kbps mp3 (since I have no bitrate limit set), it really became a non-issue.

I appreciate the assistance!

[Exrace]

When playing on other devices think about the transcoding is compressing the file making delivery to your phone and other wireless devices faster over the wireless network. You can always setup multiple players if any of your devices have that native support and then login with a user using that player setup.
I use that approach when I use remote control client with my subsonic server that sits on my HTPC setup.