Bugzilla – Bug 6315
"flac" being inappropriately invoked for AIFF files?
Last modified: 2008-12-18 11:12:53 UTC
My music repository consists almost entirely of AIFF files, which the Transporter can play natively. The appropriate section of convert.conf looks like this: # Non-mp3 starts here aif aif * * - (This is a clean install of SqueezeCenter on a "new" 1.42GHz Mac Mini G4 with 1GB of RAM; I have made no modifications.) However, SqueezeCenter seems to be running "flac" for these files, instead of just streaming them out directly: Mini:~ siegel$ ps -auxww | grep flac siegel 7921 0.7 0.1 30612 700 ?? S 11:20AM 0:01.41 /Users/siegel/Library/PreferencePanes/SqueezeCenter.prefPane/Contents/server/Bin/darwin/flac -cs --totally-silent --compression-level-0 --skip=0 --until=-0 -- /Volumes/media/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Angelique Kidjo/Oremi/02 Voodoo Child.aif This is drawing CPU cycles that are already in short supply on this machine (as perverse as it sounds); it didn't seem to me that flac should be running at all...
The players make format requests in a pre-determined order. By default, this puts Flac ahead of AIF in order to conserve bandwidth over cpu cycles. AIF can play directly if you disable the unwanted AIF->Flac option.
Thanks - that seems to have sorted it out. I had no idea that the behavior was as you describe. I suppose it's possible that it may not matter to most users, since the bits aren't altered by running them through FLAC. That said, it might be handy to provide some indication of transcoding priorities, either on the player side or the server side, so that there aren't any more surprises like this.
Thanks Rich. We've got an enhancement filed at bug 1277 for adding some sort of transcoding status. The mechanism for showing the status when bitrate limited and forced to mp3 is different so we'll have to come up with something new to handle output format status. If you have any suggestions for the UI, please post them to bug 1277 As a note, in the code, it's the $client->formats array that determines order of requested formats. For SB2 onward, it's wma, ogg, flc, aiff, wav, mp3. The rest have much the same order, removing the first few options where support is not available.
This bug is being closed since it was resolved for a version which is now released! Please download the new version of SqueezeCenter (formerly SlimServer) at http://www.slimdevices.com/su_downloads.html If you are still seeing this bug, please re-open it and we will consider it for a future release.