I’ve been looking at Lidarr for when I finish transferring my media server to a new system this month, what I am unsure is how difficult it would be to downgrade my 650 FLAC album library down to 320kbps.
It was great locally, but now most of my listening is remote via Plex (Plexamp/Symfonium) and I have found 320kbps albums to be more seamless than FLAC for my usecase with little difference in quality.
I have yet to add my music library to any of my family members accounts as I am unsure how they would listen to it without plexamp and I’m still considering their options.
The main thing is I was hoping Lidarr could get me a downgraded copy to replace all my library with, does anyone have any experience in this matter?
I know that Radarr/Sonarr don’t like downgrading versions automatically.
Downgrading FLAC? Are you insane?
I just use ffmpeg to re-encode flac files to 320kbps MP3s
for %A in (*.flac) do ffmpeg -i “%~nA.flac” -b:a 320k “%~nA.mp3”
I’d go for MP3 V0 instead of 320kbps. Most will agree that the quality is the same but the size difference is quite noticable. I mean as long as you’re going lossy, you might as well be efficient with it and not throw away space.
I tried Lidarr but gave up on it and I’m just using Beets right now for organizing and converting my stuff. I don’t download music so often and a bit manual work isn’t an issue for me. I use FDK AAC and encode everything to VBR4 which is then available in Navidrome, but keep the FLACs of course.
I suggest you convert them to AAC with Apple’s excellent QAAC encoder instead. fre:ac can do it just fine once you add the encoder. Much better and more modern format than MP3, and still universally playable.
Why even live if you can’t listen to FLAC? Just upgrade your network.
320 is fine, I know technically the difference between FLAC and 320 is hard to show, but I think the tracks I have in FLAC are encoded better or something, they just sound better overall.
um just enable transcoding on your server. no need to downgrade.
