AndrewFG;362755 Wrote: > How does Settings | Advanced | File Types work? > And does Settings | Player | Audio have any impact on it?
They're related. First comes the File Types settings, which is universal and mostly tells SqueezeCenter what it is permitted to do as far as streaming and transcoding are concerned. Its only practical function, as I see it, is to permit the user to disable streaming in some particular format. Since Flac is normally the default format use, then this in turn means it's only really useful for forcing streaming in WAV. > If so, what are the parameters of e.g. client PC, O/S, SqeezeCenter, LAN > type, LAN speed, player type etc. that determine which actual stream > format is sent? OS (and the software expected to be installed on that OS) determines which conversions might be found on the File Types page. The actual streaming format is determined by that, the player type, and the bitrate limiting setting on the player's Audio setting page. With lossless file formats, newer (Squeezebox2 and later) players will normally use Flac for streaming. Older players, which aren't capable of decoding Flac in their firmware, will be sent a WAV stream. > All of my music files are in Apple MP4 (file extension .M4A) and 99% of > them are are encoded using Apple Lossless. Is this what you call > "alac"? Yes and no. Apple Lossless is often referred to as ALAC. But on the File Types page, at least on my Windows system, the file format is shown as "Apple Lossless" and the decoder "alac" refers to the alac.exe program that is used to decode the format. > The File Types page allows conversion of Apple Lossless to FLAC, MP3 or > WAV. I suppose the best stream type for my files is FLAC? Or is it WAV? You shouldn't have to worry about it, as the best format will automaticlaly be chosen. But see the next answer, below. > And are there any circumstances why I would want SqueezeCenter to > convert to any other format than the best? Two that I can think of. One practical, the other fairly controversial and argued in other threads. If you have wireless network issues, you might want to set bitrate limiting just to get wireless streaming to work. This is particular the case for older players that must be streamed WAV over a slower 802.11b network and that have small buffers, making dropouts much more common than with newer players. The other reason is debatable, but I'll mention it, and hope the thread doesn't go off on a tangent. Some audiophiles claim that WAV sounds better than Flac (and some claim Flac sounds better than WAV, so it goes both ways). This shouldn't be the case, as Flac is lossless and will decode to exactly the same bits and bytes. Theories on why this might be the case generally speculate that the greater CPU activity needed to decode the Flac stream has a negative audible effect. Conversely, speculation as to why Flac might sound better than WAV is that the CPU and network electronics actually do less work handling the lower network traffic. They sound exactly the same to me. > Is it safer to disable all but the best formats? Can't hurt anything, but it's no "safer". Disabling, say, Mp3 streaming for ALAC, won't accomplish anything if you don't have bitrate limiting set. I stream from my home SqueezeCenter to my work computer running Squeezeslave, with a library in Flac. The only practical way to do that is to set bitrate limiting and stream in Mp3. But that only affects that one player, and the others are streamed in Flac. > This leads to my next question: does Settings | Player | Audio have any > impact on how Settings | Advanced | File Types works? > > Do any of the player specific crossfade, clock, bitrate limiting, LAME > quality level, volume adjustment, replay gain, settings have any impact > on the stream format that SqueezeCenter sends? Just bitrate limiting. Setting it to anything other than 'No Limit' will mean transcoding to Mp3. > And what happens when I have two (different type) players synchronized > to the same music? You won't have to worry about it unless you have a pre-SB2 player synched to a newer one. All the newer players have the same decoding capabilities in their firmware. -- JJZolx Jim ------------------------------------------------------------------------ JJZolx's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=10 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=55442 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
