Confused as to how EMBY handles my music, does it always transcode?

[Carlo 4560]

 

Just now, Ronstang said:

Not exactly sure where to find what you are asking for on the server dashboard.

When your playing back anything from your system it will show up on the web admin Dashboard. It tells you how i'ts being played back and you can click on one of the icons to bring up the reason for a transcode  if it's taking place.

On an Emby client in the playback screen you can click on the gear icon and select stats for nerds which will give you stats of playback and what the reason is for the conversion.

[Luke 42077]

9 minutes ago, Ronstang said:

In the dashboard under playback the only option I have under audio is playback language

Try this again on a remote connection and there will be a remote quality setting.

[Ronstang 293]

4 minutes ago, cayars said:

 

When your playing back anything from your system it will show up on the web admin Dashboard. It tells you how i'ts being played back and you can click on one of the icons to bring up the reason for a transcode  if it's taking place.

 

It has a box showing that the song is playing and says it's tanscoding but I see no icons to click on for more info.

[Happy2Play 9780]

Both Edge (chromium) and Chrome show flac as direct playing on the dashboard for me (local).

@cayars note music does not have nerd stats or info via Dashboard.

I can only get flac to transcode by limiting my Internet quality: via user playback setting on remote connection.  user icon-playback (only available via remote/WAN connection)

Edited July 31, 2020 by Happy2Play

[Ronstang 293]

2 minutes ago, Luke said:

Try this again on a remote connection and there will be a remote quality setting.

Just tried from the machine I use to remote desktop into my HTPC and in the web app for Emby on that machine it has nothing more than language as an option under audio

[Carlo 4560]

4 minutes ago, Ronstang said:

It has a box showing that the song is playing and says it's tanscoding but I see no icons to click on for more info.

 

3 minutes ago, Happy2Play said:

@cayars note music does not have nerd stats or info via Dashboard.

Thanks Happy2Play, I didn't realize that.

Well for videos it would be the icon shown in red but not going to help here.

[Ronstang 293]

All good info, glad to know about nerd stats.....can't argue with more information 

[pwhodges 2012]

For flac in Windows you may need this to get the codec into the Windows system:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/flac-player/9wzdncrfj3jz?activetab=pivot:overviewtab

Other programs which use ffmpeg or similar may be happy without this (or some equivalent), but I guess Chrome isn't.

The plain fact is that Emby and its client can direct play your flac files (as it does mine), and it's some setup or missing option on your system that's preventing it.

Paul

Edited August 1, 2020 by pwhodges

[Ronstang 293]

Ok, it seems I made a mistake.  I only added the WavPack folder to the database at first.  Then I decided to add the parent folder which had the album in FLAC tracks and an extra folder with a bonus disc in FLAC.....for some reason the WavPack tracks alone showed as individual tracks and not as an album with the relative info.....once I added the parent directory it flipped and now the WavPack tracks showed as the album and now the FLAC tracks showed as individual tracks.....I'm not sure how this happened ad the WavPack tracks were in a subfolder called "WavPack Tracks". anyway the WavPack are transcoded and the FLAC are not so I was incorrect earlier.

All is well for me though as at least Emby plays the WavPack files which means when I switch to Premiere they should direct play.

[Ronstang 293]

3 hours ago, cayars said:

Hey Ronstang, you may want to rethink a couple of your formats if you're looking for best quality sound. 

I value your opinion so no disrespect intended but I have done all the research.  Technical specs don't mean much if the perceived differences are slight but what the algorithm decides to keep and what it decides to throw away are what is important to me.

AAC is best at low bit rates which is why it is an Apple standard because when iPods were small cramming as much music on it as possible was important and 128 kb/s was king......I have never had nor will I have any music compressed that much.  As the bit rate climbs the MP3s, especially LAME encoded ones have more detail because the algorithm is superior to Apple's...plus the file size is smaller for mp3.  At 192 kb/s ACC and MP3 sound almost identical to most people but as the bitrate climbs the MP3 has more detail.....which is what is important to me because the music of yesteryear had huge dynamic range and many more subtleties that do not exist in modern overly produced and overly loud music. All modern music is produced with minimal dynamic range because it is compressed in a manner from the moment it's made.  Listen to anything from the Doors on headphones and compare it to anything contemporary and the evidence is clear about dynamic range and the myriad of sounds that used to exist in music that does not anymore.....or very rarely.....but the the way they produce modern music it all has way too much gain.  As the bit rates rise above 256 MP3 sound better for the kind of music I listen to and the file sizes are about 10% or more smalller.  All my MP3 I make are VBR with  the average bit rate always above 256 so I will stay with LAME MP3s. 

I appreciate your opinion and the information you provided was informative and made me pause and do a little reflection.  I am always willing to listen to different opinions because that is how I learn new things so thank you for your time.

[Carlo 4560]

Having different opinions is what makes the world go round.  If we all agreed on everything and did things only one way it would be a pretty boring place!

You'd have to make a hard sell to me to win me over that MP3 is better than AAC in any respect except maybe have more players/compatibility but AAC is almost as popular.  AAC while much better at lower bit rates still is better at high bit rates as well. It's just about impossible for a sample rate of 16 kHz to 48 kHz (MP3) to produce audio that is better than 8 kHz to 96 kHz (AAC) all else being equal.  AAC will sound clearer and brighter than the MP3 which is muddier and duller sounding since it doesn't have as much fidelity to work with. But at 256K most people can't tell the difference between the two.

https://www.movavi.com/learning-portal/aac-vs-mp3.html

"Now to the big question. Is AAC better than MP3? On matters quality, AAC dominates MP3 at lower bit-rates. However, at normal bit-rates (above 160 kbps), the differences are hardly noticeable. While regular listeners won't mind listening to MP3 files, audiophiles generally prefer AAC file formats."

Personally I think an audiophile will avoid them both and use a lossless format.

PS on a side, side not: It's always surprised me that Emby during transcodes will pick MP3 over AAC for the sound channel using lower bitrates when the devise can play them both.

I totally agree with you on how music is produced these days.  One of my favorite rock bands (Rush) is a good example of this if you listen to their albums chronologically you'll hear the way were produced when they went down this path and back again. 

[pwhodges 2012]

I probably count as an audiophile, and have worked professionally in the audio industry as well as providing demonstration recordings for new developments in surround sound on a freelance basis.  The vast majority of people (including audiophiles who think otherwise) cannot distinguish lossy formats at a sufficiently high bit rate, regardless of which algorithm is used.  The same also goes for the difference between 48kHz and 96kHz sampling - differences of opinion in this relate to deep misunderstandings about how sampling works (and the deficiencies of early converters), but this is not the place to go into that.

For my part, I keep all my working materials in lossless formats of course, usually at 24-bit depth, but I record at 44.1kHz or 48kHz.  The point is to avoid the possibility of progressive degradation during editing and other processing.  For my own portable listening I mainly used ogg/vorbis is the past and now opus; bur I am gradually transitioning to using flac, simply because lossy formats are losing their justification for existing at all with the continuing increase in storage density on the one hand and ease of streaming from central storage to wherever you are on the other.

It is worth noting that in spite of what I said above about lossy formats, there is also the point that the processing can go wrong in edge cases, which is one reason to change to avoiding no-longer necessary processing altogether.  As an example of this, I offer the same short clip encoded to mp3 at 192kbps in 2009 by the then current versions of the Fraunhofer decoder and Lame - one is pathologically bad. The filenames of the attached indicate which is which.

Paul

 

JC-sample-FH192.mp3 JC-sample-L192.mp3

[Luke 42077]

14 hours ago, Luke said:

Ok that's a good one but it doesn't show flac.

What about this one, what does it say next to flac? https://hpr.dogphilosophy.net/test/

Did you try this?

[Luke 42077]

On 8/1/2020 at 9:32 AM, Luke said:

Did you try this?

@Ronstang?

[khohada 4]

So......Does emby support .tak file as music media nowadays? Which version of emby server should I use? A lot of my Anime BDrip CDs are finned as "cue+tak".

[Luke 42077]

6 minutes ago, khohada said:

So......Does emby support .tak file as music media nowadays? Which version of emby server should I use? A lot of my Anime BDrip CDs are finned as "cue+tak".

Does ffmpeg support that? If so then we should be able to.

[Davey's 37]

What exactly does 'Music transcoding fixes' mean, in the new server version ?

https://github.com/MediaBrowser/Emby.Releases/releases

[Luke 42077]

6 hours ago, Davey's said:

What exactly does 'Music transcoding fixes' mean, in the new server version ?

https://github.com/MediaBrowser/Emby.Releases/releases

There were some issues with seeking when music was being transcoded. It has no effect on whether transcoding happens or not.