Realtime transcoding for mobile (android/apple) client?

[fross]

Hi all,

my music collection on my NAS is almost all FLAC, so while I would like to stream it with the DS Audio app to my phone, this would use an unfeasible amount of bandwidth. What I would ideally like is for the NAS to transcode to some other music format before sending it across the network. Ideally, the user could choose which format (or at least bitrate), or it could make an assumption based on the user's connectivity (Edge, 3G, etc).

1) Does it already doing this and am I missing it?

2) If not, could I help in writing this, for the Android client at least? I'm a Java developer with an interest in music and familiar with music compression formats, and don't think it would be difficult. Is the app open source/available to collaborate on?

Thanks in advance!

[fross]

Okay, I have since found and gone through the other threads on transcoding, but again there doesn't seem to be anything specific to the mobile client. I think this is more important than the browser clients as phones will always have less bandwidth to play with (whether wifi or cell data), can anyone weigh on in what is happening with this, if anything?

[ljun]

any new updates on this? Would be nice if the DS413j could transcode audio from whatever format to something palatable on a mobile device when away? (iOS streaming)

[Neurosion]

Since this is in the same boat as the bitrate thread, I'll add my +1 here. Note that most of the recent DS+ boxes (such as DS213+) already have support for transcoding if the target doesn't have the appropriate codecs. I would be less hopeful for the DS413J because it's single-core, so the transcoding step might be an unacceptable performance issue.

For machines with multiple cores, this seems like a simple fix; just allow us to force the MP3 transcoding that already exists according to a setting (by user, by client, whatever's easiest).

[Ashjuk]

Seem to work OK with my iPhone so I would presume it does the same on Android.

I have all my music on my DS212j in flac format and I can play them fine on the iPhone which, as far as I know, does not support flac - so DS Audio must be doing on-the-fly transcoding.

[Neurosion]

This is known. The problem is that when a device DOES support FLAC, Audio Station won't transcode it. This results in DS Audio rapidly devouring our data plans. We are looking for an option to force transcoding to something lower-bitrate regardless of codex support to reduce the used bandwidth. Our assertion, as yet unchallenged, is that Audio Station already has the ability to transcode to MP3, so this should require little more than adding a preference and providing a checkbox.

[Neurosion]

I have all my music on my DS212j in flac format and I can play them fine on the iPhone which, as far as I know, does not support flac - so DS Audio must be doing on-the-fly transcoding.

I forgot to mention that the DS212j is likely transcoding to WAV rather than MP3, so unless you've got unlimited data I would keep an eye on your data usage.