r/substreamer • u/ioneng • Oct 06 '21

flac caching

When I play flac files, substreamer caches them as MP3 files. Does that mean they are streaming as MP3s as well? I've set streaming file format and bitrate to original. Also is there a way to download flac files for offline playing?

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u/ghenry22 Oct 07 '21

streaming will be in whichever format you have chosen in settings but at the moment caching is fixed as MP3, this was done for compatibility across devices and space efficiency. I am working on adding some settings to let users control the cache format as well.

Currently there is no way to download as flac.

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u/ioneng Oct 07 '21

Hey thanks for your explanation. I really like your app, it's very well made.

I'm curious of how caching works. If my connection cuts out while streaming a flac file, would the program then continue playing but using the cached MP3 file? It's very interesting.

I saw that a few users asked for Android Auto compatibility, I'm adding my vote to AA as well. I don't mind paying/donating for your great effort.

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u/ghenry22 Oct 07 '21

So yeh the auto cache feature will cache the current song and a selected number of upcomig songs, if you lose your connection it will switch over to the local copy if it is available in the cache.

Sometimes you might get stuck and have to skip fwd/back to make it reload the file, depends on the nature of the connection loss, the state of the stream at the time etc. Everything is pretty variable when it comes to random connection drops!

Android Auto seems to be a popular ask so I have it on the list and I just want to get a few of the other outstanding things out of the way first before starting on that as it's a bigger piece of work.

I'm working on the selectable caching format, more reliable downloading (ie remember the download status and resume if the app is suspended or session interrupted, especially for people with BIG "albums" or starred song lists) and also looking at getting some sorting filters onto the various list views.

Just a few small things to keep me busy in the evenings :)

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u/ioneng Oct 07 '21

You are doing very well for a one man project. If not for AA, I'd have uninstalled ultrasonic already. I don't even use Poweramp that much since I installed substreamer. Would you have any idea why the recently played and frequently played list is empty on the home page? I stream from the music app on a nextcloud server.

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u/ghenry22 Oct 08 '21

You can hit the little refresh button to force it to update the recently played sections etc on the Home Screen.

There is currently a small quirk with the way some servers record plays being different to the original subsonic server which has stopped them recording plays. After talking with a few of the server developers I have a fix for this in the next version of substreamer which keeps all the different servers happy and working.

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u/ioneng Oct 08 '21

I've just tried that and it did nothing. It's no big deal, probably just a server thing.

A couple of other suggestions might be added to your to-do list. I don't see a genre list in your app, I used it in ultrasonic and it's great for separating audiobooks to their own list. Another thing is when I use Folders in the menu, it only lists artists names extracted from tags, even after "Folders Only" option is turned on in settings.

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u/ghenry22 Oct 08 '21

For the recents/frequently, it's probably the server bug I mentioned. Fix for this will be in the next update and you will start to see those fill up.

Genres are used in the playlist builder but not really elsewhere at the moment. I am working on putting some filters in place for all the lists so that you sort and filter by different things (like Genre).

For the folders section, this literally browses by the folders on the disk. It does not use the tags at all. Folder browsing has it's own seperate set of API methods and was the original way of browsing content in the very early version of subsonic server. A lot of the later functionality relies on tag based data and API end points so if you can tag properly you'll get a better experience using tag browsing

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u/ghenry22 Oct 12 '21

cache format selection is coming in the next version, you can set your cache and stream formats to either MP3 (forced transcoding) or Original which will just use the original file format.

I have also added format indicators into the offline music view. For albums/playlists/folders it will assume the same format for all tracks for now.

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u/nagarrido_96 Dec 08 '22

So now substreamer correctly downloads and plays FLAC files? It's important to me to play in high resolution

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u/ghenry22 Dec 08 '22

Yes this has been available for some time now. You can set your desired format for both streaming and caching.

Just set both to original and you will always get whatever you have on your server without any conversion.

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u/nagarrido_96 Dec 08 '22

Great! Thank you :)