Author Topic: On-the-fly Conversion: Allow "convert lossless or unsupported formats"  (Read 1181 times)

tr00st

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tl;dr: it'd be nice to be able to constrain sync conversion behaviour to retain lossy files that can be played by the device whilst still converting FLAC files.


I'm using MusicBee to handle playback of my library, which is mostly FLAC, but has a few odd bits and pieces in various lossy formats (ogg vorbis, mp3, wma) from over the years. I've been using the sync tool to copy music onto my phone for mobile listening which mostly covers my needs, but...

The general priorities (and personal preferences I guess) I have for playback are:

* Avoid transcoding where necessary, to try and minimize stacked encoding artifacts
* Transcode file-types that aren't supported, so I can play all music that's being synced
* Transcode the FLACs to something lossy, so I can fit a much better selection of music on the device

Worth noting that this could probably be achieved if I could manually override the supported file-types (ie: pretend the device doesn't support FLAC), though I imagine that'd be more work than it's worth, unless there's some config/registry hack that I could make to achieve it?

And thanks for all the hard work - MusicBee is by far the closest to "perfect to my needs", and it's much appreciated. I hope the extra context helps justify the "need". As a dev myself, I also appreciate that dev time is always limited, so fully understand if this one's never important enough :)

Zak

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MusicBee's sync settings already allow for all the scenarios described, except for this:

* Transcode file-types that aren't supported, so I can play all music that's being synced

So I'm curious to know what format/codec you have that can be played by MusicBee, but not your mobile device?  :-\
Bee excellent to each other...

tr00st

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MusicBee's sync settings already allow for all the scenarios described, except for this:

* Transcode file-types that aren't supported, so I can play all music that's being synced

So I'm curious to know what format/codec you have that can be played by MusicBee, but not your mobile device?  :-\

Yeah, as usual, it's the combination of three that's awkward. I've currently got it just transcoding everything non-vorbis using the "Convert all files except OGG files with 192k or less bitrate", which isn't ideal, but at least the music plays...

WMAs are the problem for me - there's a handful I have with great regret, and at least 1 CD that's scratched enough that I can't rerip it (yes, past me is a bad person...). I'm probably just going to have to rebuy those CDs at some point, I know, but still...

In fairness, I do have some (old) dedicated players that can only deal a *very* limited set of codecs, so I'd be more surprised about having formats that the player could handle and MusicBee couldn't.

hiccup

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Slightly off-topic, but a pragmatic solution perhaps:

Try ripping one of your WMA's to Opus, using its highest quality settings.
Yes, 'transcoding is bad', but Opus is really very good.
Then do a listening test between the WMA and the Opus version.
I am curious if you will be able to hear a difference. (be honest ;-)
And if you do: is it really bad, and would you recognise it if you weren't doing A-B comparing?

tr00st

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Slightly off-topic, but a pragmatic solution perhaps:

Try ripping one of your WMA's to Opus, using its highest quality settings.
Yes, 'transcoding is bad', but Opus is really very good.
Then do a listening test between the WMA and the Opus version.
I am curious if you will be able to hear a difference. (be honest ;-)
And if you do: is it really bad, and would you recognise it if you weren't doing A-B comparing?

Yeah, it's a fair plan - I'm not going to pretend I've got the best ears in the world, and my BT earbuds and car stereo will be doing horrendous enough things to probably make it moot... and realistically, the plan was to transcode them to *something* all along.

TBH I think I was always going to buy the replacement CDs at some point, just figured this set of constraints wasn't *that* weird (given portable devices tend to be less capable than desktops...), so figured it was probably worth raising  :)

(and since my original post, I've already gone and replaced the most important album anyway...)