Transcode all wav and aiff files to flac

[geofstro]

Another transcoding question from me; is it possible to transcode all wav and aif files to flac? Perhaps better still would be to flac with an ogg wrapper?

I want the result to be completely lossless audio compression.

If it is possible, would someone be kind enough to post the ffmpeg command?

Thanks in advance.

Geoff

[GJ51]

To what end? If you transcode to flac or ogg neither will play in JW Player in the web interface. Are you planning to use an external player?

ogg wil play in the Android app, but if you do lossless transcodnig, you'll probably use too much bandwidth for the stream to play well without lowering the bitrate.

On the destop I transcode flac to mp3 which outputs 1500kbps vbr which is very high quality sound that I don't think suffers from the process. The same settings will do the same for wav or aif.

[geofstro]

Yes, it's for external players on both IOS and Mac. Both z-subsonic and iSub will handle flac on IOS. On Mac VLC. So why go lossy?.

I have encoded some aif and wavs to flac and they play fine on these players. I want to avoid doing this for my entire libraries though. They're in a mixture of aif and wav.

Thanks

Geoff

[GJ51]

VLC should be able to handle the native files without any transcoding, so just send them without any transcoding enabled by deselecting the transcoding in the options for the defined player.

I'm not sure what formats the ios players will handle natively as I only use an Androird device, but if they will playback ogg (I think it will as I have had others test this for me before ... I think) then I can send you the string I use.

ogg audio | mp3 oga aac flac m4a wma wav aif aiff ape mpc shn | ogg | ffmpeg -v 0 -i %s -f ogg -vn -acodec libvorbis -ar 44100 -aq 6 -ac 2 -map_meta_data 0:0 -

I know this works for Android, but I don't think it works on the iOS players. I 'don't know why unless they just don't playback ogg as a native format.

HTH

[geofstro]

Thanks Gary. What's still not clear to me though is whether this would convert the uncompressed files to a lossy format.

What I'm after is to convert wav and aif files to native flac or flac with an oga wrapper. I believe if ogg is just used as a wrapper for streaming, there'll be no loss of quality over the uncompressed files or native flac.

If you think your string will accomplish this I'll give it a try.

My IOS apps can handle flac wrapped or unwrapped. I'm not confident though that they can handle uncompressed wav or aif due to bandwidth issues.

Thanks again,

Geoff

[GJ51]

Well, this brings us back to what is practical in each environment. There's no need for any transcoding on the desktop if you pipe everything to VLC, so we're really talkin about what's pratical in iOS for portable devices usually getting connected over 2g/4g or wifi. If you can get ogg working with your iOS devices I think that is your best option as it is well regarded for it's efficiency and quality at higher settings. Again my recollection is that we weren't able to get it working before on iOS but it's worth a try if the iSub and other app authors confirm if they can play ogg.

Otherwise I think you'll be stuck with whatever transcoding is set up for your apps.

Even ogg is going to transcode into something less than lossless, but I haven't heard of any way around that on portable devices. My Android app can handle mp3 or ogg coming from the server - that's it; and that's fine by me because in most environments where I'm using the phone app I need the compression to get reasonable playback without buffering and playback problems.

Of course, the best answer is a Samsung Galaxy SIII with 32GB internal and a 64GB external SD. Then you can just load it up with whatever you want to take with you in HQ.

I'm actually waiting to pull the trigger on the 64GB internal mem Note 2 and add the 64 GB ext SD for a total of 128 GB of storage. Then bandwidth won't be an issue when I'm on the road.

[geofstro]

Thanks again Gary. The author of iSub has confirmed that his app supports flac and indeed it plays just fine with pre-encoded files. What I was trying to avoid was duplicating my entire air/wav library into flac format (actually flac with an ogg wrapper; but that is still lossless).

You are probably right though, that this will prove impractical one way or another, so I'll give your ogg command a try.

Thanks once again for your help on this.

Geoff