[geeks] music collection flac and mp3 by device

[Joshua Boyd]

On Thu, Sep 29, 2016 at 11:07:03PM -0400, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:

> The issue is of course that I end up with every song duplicated in iTunes, or
> whatever other music player software I am running.

iTunes doesn't support flac, so if you are using iTunes to manage the
music on your mobile devices, then this isn't going to be a problem
for you.

With a desktop player like Clementine, you would just point clementine
at only the flac files and it would transcode to mp3 when it is
pushing the files to your mobiled device.  That is according to the
documentation since I have never used Clementine to download to a
mobile device, only for playback on a desktop/laptop.

If you were do manage/play your music with Plex, you would feed the
plex server only the flac files and it would convert them on demand
for the plex client on your iPhone/Android device, or for the plex web
browser client, while still playing the original flac files for
clients that are able to on the local network.  Note, that the mobile
clients will locally save the converted content when instructed to for
offline usage.

I use Plex exactly as described with my CDs ripped to flac files and
ultimately mostly listening to mp3 version streamed or cached on my
phone.  It doesn't make it easy to manage playlists the way I want to
though (I generally want to add/reorder entire albums not single
songs).  I just haven't found a good alternative yet.

There is an open source alternative called Emby.  I know it supports
streaming transcoding, but I don't know much beyond that.  I keep
meaning to give it a try.