Feature request: FLAC to WAV transcoding

[simoncn]

(01-04-2012 11:39)knijsterbek Wrote:  Hello Simon,

First of all, I have to compliment you for all the good work you have put into Minimserver. It works great on my QNAP NAS and I enjoy using it a lot!

Because I prefer the SQ of WAV over FLAC, I wonder if you plan to incorporate the transcoding of FLAC files to WAV, before sending them to the streamer. That way, the benefits of FLAC (tagging, album art) and the benefits of WAV (for me: SQ) could be bundled.

Paul

Thanks for the kind words! I've been expecting someone to ask about this.

I don't have any near-term plans to support transcoding. If I were to add support for this in the future, it would require you to separately download and install external software (such as FFmpeg) to do the FLAC to WAV transcoding, with an option in MinimServer to invoke a separate transcoding program as part of audio streaming.

One day when I'm not busy working on MinimServer, I plan to do some double-blind comparisons of 44.1/16 and 96/24 music to see if I can reliably detect a difference. I'll also do the same for FLAC and WAV at equal resolution. If I can hear an improvement with WAV under double-blind conditions, this would increase the priority of adding transcoding support to MinimServer.