Transcode Flac to Wav question

Posted by: Fretfan on 21 February 2014

With the recent threads about transcoding Flac to Wav, I am in the process of hacking Twonky 5 on my WD Mybook Live, to force it to transcode to wav.

My question is, how do you know that your system is successfully transcoding. ?

Does your streamer show the incoming stream as a WAV, but your music file is a FLAC...? or does the streamer still report it as a FLAC, even though it is being converted ..

thanks

Posted on: 21 February 2014 by Pev

My Superuniti shows it as a wav even though all my files are flac - the streamer won't know it's transcoded - it gets a perfect wav stream.

Posted on: 21 February 2014 by GraemeH

Originally Posted by Fretfan:

With the recent threads about transcoding Flac to Wav, I am in the process of hacking Twonky 5 on my WD Mybook Live, to force it to transcode to wav.

My question is, how do you know that your system is successfully transcoding. ?

Does your streamer show the incoming stream as a WAV, but your music file is a FLAC...? or does the streamer still report it as a FLAC, even though it is being converted ..

thanks

How do you 'adjust' the Twonky on the WD MBL?

Posted on: 21 February 2014 by Scooot

Hi fretfan,
If you get the transcoding to work with twonky if it is not to much trouble will you please post details of the procedure.i would like to try this but have no idea if how to set it up.

Cheers scott

Posted on: 21 February 2014 by Scooot

Graham best me to it

Posted on: 21 February 2014 by Fretfan

Originally Posted by GraemeH:

Originally Posted by Fretfan:

With the recent threads about transcoding Flac to Wav, I am in the process of hacking Twonky 5 on my WD Mybook Live, to force it to transcode to wav.

My question is, how do you know that your system is successfully transcoding. ?

Does your streamer show the incoming stream as a WAV, but your music file is a FLAC...? or does the streamer still report it as a FLAC, even though it is being converted ..

thanks

How do you 'adjust' the Twonky on the WD MBL?

Unfortunately the Twonky interface does not let you set it, but Twonky does support transcoding..

When I finally get it to work, I will post full instructions however for the curious you have to ....

1, set the WD Live to use SSH protocol... ie go to http://<your mybook ip address>/UI/ssh

2. After you have set it, you can access the drive like a Linux box using an application called Putty.

3. cd to /usr/local/twonkymedia-5/cgi-bin and edit a file called flac-wav.desc

this is what I have in the file...

# transcode audio (flac to wav)
#(c) 2010 by PacketVideo
exec: flac $infile -dfs --force-raw-format --endian=big --sign=signed -o $outfile
# capabilities
from=audio/x-flac
to=audio/x-wav
synchronous
priority=idle

then restart twonky with the command /etc/init.d/twonky restart

But at the moment my ND5XS still tells me it is a Flac stream... hence my original question

When I get it playing ball, I will post step by step instructions about what worked for me...

cheers

Posted on: 21 February 2014 by GraemeH

Thanks very much.....I was lost after step 1 so I think I'll stick with FLAC!

cheers

Posted on: 21 February 2014 by Sloop John B

Originally Posted by Fretfan:

My question is, how do you know that your system is successfully transcoding. ?

thanks

If you can't tell by the sound what's the point?

SJB

Posted on: 21 February 2014 by Fretfan

Originally Posted by Sloop John B:

Originally Posted by Fretfan:

My question is, how do you know that your system is successfully transcoding. ?

thanks

If you can't tell by the sound what's the point?

SJB

Sloop

As you are probably aware, wav does sound that bit better than flac, however I have to A/B them to tell the difference. When I do so, I always find myself preferring the WAV. My NAS drive is 90% WAV anyway, but I would like to save some space.

Posted on: 21 February 2014 by Bart

nStream reveals what's being played. It says "flac" or "wav."