Newbie question about music sync

[PatrickJ 0]

Hi,

 

I recently became fed up waiting for Plex to sort out their sync issues (been waiting 5+ years for this function to become reliable), and a buddy of mine recommended Emby for this purpose. I installed Emby server on my Windows 10 server, and bought a monthly license to give it a try. Unfortunately I'm not having much more luck syncing my music library with Emby, but I'm still hopeful as I suspect I might be doing something wrong or just not used to how Emby does things. I do much prefer the way Emby handles the music metadata, so if I can only get the sync to work I'm a happy camper. Let me begin with a short description of my system:

 

* Emby installed on a windows 10 machine, running a i7 8700K CPU so lots of horse power

* Music library on a QNAP NAS within the same network

* Trying to sync the music library to an Android tablet (Huawei Mediapad M5), using an SD card (Sandisk 400Gb)

* Music library contains of about 550 albums, all ripped by me from CDs, DVD-A and SACD. Around 5600 files in total

 

 

My questions:

 

1. Once the sync has been initiated and conversion has started, it seems to be running quite slow. CPU utilisation is around 10% by Emby server. Is there any way to prioritise this process, to speed up things? With the current speed, this conversion will take days to complete.

 

2. It seems the way Emby works is that it first converts all files before loading them to my mobile device - is that correct? I've been running the sync for 5-6h now, the dashboard reports that 6% is complete but so far no content is available on my tablet. I'm hoping this can somehow be configured to be done on a file-to-file basis, so if you're in a hurry and don't have the time to sync the entire library, at least you get as far as it's possible. Currently it seems to be  "all or nothing".

 

3. When I chose  to sync my music library, the quality options seem to be video specific options rather than music specific (options I get are 1.5-15 Mbps). Is there something wrong with my config, making Emby not recognise my music as music, or am I missing something here? I was expecting a more MP3 oriented range here, like 128kbit-320kbit or similar. Again - I might be missing something! When viewing my music in Emby, it plays and views perfectly.

 

 

Thanks in advance!

 

/Patrick

[Carlo 4330]

If this is a brand new install, Emby could be doing a lot behind the scenes scanning files, doing indexing, roku thumbnail creations (depending on your options).  These types of things would all use the CPU which the transcoder would need.  This may or may not be the cause for the slow transcode for the sync files.

 

Please upload your server log file and the ffmpeg log file and we can take a look at it for you.

 

Carlo

[PatrickJ 0]

Hi Carlo,

 

Thanks for the reply! The install was made about 2 weeks ago, but only now had time to play around with it properly. I'm attaching the embyserver log and a few of the latest ffmpeg-transcode logs (quite a few of them!). Just need to mention I had a internet outage last night around midnight, which has caused some errors in the log. 

 

 

I cancelled the conversion yesterday as it felt pretty much stuck (might not have been though!). Tested with one album just to see how Emby works. Indeed it looks like the entire album was transcoded first, and only once that was done was it loaded to my tablet. The good news is I could both view and play it on my tablet once the sync was done! I then restarted syncing the entire music library, and now about 1 day later the dashboard reports that 33% of my media has been converted. Nothing is seen on the mobile device. 

 

Also, clicking My Media/Music sometimes is snappy and shows my albums with cover art etc, but most of the time it's extremely sluggish (only get the spinning circle for about 20 seconds or more and then nothing as if no music has been added). I would assume this has to do with the transcoding going on in the background, so it would be great to verify if there is a way of allocate more power for Emby. Currently my total CPU utilisation is about 15% with the transcoding on-going, Emby only uses 10-13% it seems.

 

Patrick

 

 

 

embyserver.txt

ffmpeg-transcode-000bdb33-5f0c-451d-a8d7-00092b118f7a_1.txt

ffmpeg-transcode-00bc413b-c7ba-4fa6-ae0b-70aaf50b595e_1.txt

ffmpeg-transcode-00aa2a3a-2a45-43b2-830b-7dd4dacefc08_1.txt

ffmpeg-transcode-0a4ef47f-a8dd-4955-a5c6-c3cecb262c0f_1.txt

[legallink 187]

If you are syncing mp3s, there should t be any converting/transcoding happening. I would do thinks in a small sample basis and go from there.

 

1. Start a sync with just 1 file. See if it works.

2. Make sure you leave the syncing device on and connected to the network.

3. Transcoding/Converting takes a long time, see if you can change the sync settings so it syncs the original file. It will make everything faster.

[Luke 37065]

These examples are higher bitrate dsf files, so that is why they're converting. What if you stop the conversion task, is it no longer sluggish?

[jlambie 15]

Hi,

 

I'm just bumping this - thanks! - because I'm looking for some clarity on an aspect of this. I have searched in the forums and manual, but maybe I'm not phrasing it correctly. Can I sync hi-res audio files (90% FLAC, 10% others) via mobile sync to an ios device for offline use? I appreciate it would take longer, but is it possible? Or would the ios/FLAC issue also come into play? In which case, can I mobile sync to ios if they're ALAC? 

 

Thanks! 

[Luke 37065]

Hi there @@jlambie,yes you can. in the app's settings you can specify the audio download quality. Simply set that to unlimited. Please let us know if this helps. Thanks.

[jlambie 15]

Hi there @@jlambie,yes you can. in the app's settings you can specify the audio download quality. Simply set that to unlimited. Please let us know if this helps. Thanks.

 

Thanks, yes - works fine.

[Luke 37065]

Thanks for the feedback.