Transcoding Fast Forward

[simoncn]

(01-05-2014 16:20)Mr Frog Wrote:  Hi Simon

Thank you for the quick response - much appreciated

I used dbpoweramp to rip the CD's using uncompressed FLAC. Other files are also uncompressed downloads.

There are no seek table options within dbpoweramp, but when the uncompressed files are streamed as FLAC, the fast forward or seek function (n-Stream) works faultlessly. It's only when I transcode (flac:wav24) to serve transcoded to Wav files to the player that I can no longer use this seek function.

As such, the uncompressed FLAC files can use the seek function without any problem whatsoever but not if transcoded to wav - so I'm not sure if a seek table in the FLAC files or compressing them will alter anything - because it works fine for FLAC.

Is there a way to get the transcode issue fixed?

The slow seek time when transcoding is caused by using uncompressed FLAC and also not having a seek table.

Without transcoding, seeking is done by jumping to a given byte offset in the FLAC file. The time taken to do this is very small and doesn't vary much with not having a seek table or using uncompressed FLAC.

With transcoding, the byte offset in the WAV stream needs to be translated to a byte offset in the FLAC file by reading through the FLAC file. The time taken to do this is increased very considerably by not having a seek table or using uncompressed FLAC.

Please refer to the other thread for how you can add a seek table to your files or change the FLAC compression level. Of these two options, the shortest seek time when transcoding will be achieved by adding a seek table.