Airsonic-Advanced always forced MP3 transcoding

Support
1

Issue description:

I have a collection of mp3 and ALAC files.

Im currently using:
Dsub + Airsonic-Advanced with dsub set to forced transcoding to 320kbps mp3.

What i want to use:
Symfonic + Airsonic-Advanced with forced transcoding to 320kbps mp3.

Hi guys. Symfonium really is breaking my head on how it handles transcoding. What do i have to setup and how to just get Airsonic-Advanced to only provide Smyfonic with 320kbps MP3 files? I never want original files, no matter what case or what network. All i want si Airsonic-Advanced to ALWAYS send 320kbps MP3 files ONLY to Symfonium. What do i need to do to get that working?

I also tried by connecting to Navidrome Demo server and then a REALLY strange behavior of Symfonium happened. When i set Symfonium to only Download 160kbps from Navidromes Flac file, Symfonium does download a flac file with 160kbps opus audio inside. What is going on? I dont understand.

Logs:

Upload description: sonic

Additional information:

 

 

Reproduction steps:

 

 

Media provider:

Airsonic-Advanced aka Subsonic

Screenshots:

     

2

Just set the download quality and transcode quality in settings.

3

Ok, sorry for the confusion but i decided to not use opus and opt to use mp3 instead.
I changed the title and opening post accordingly.

But I encountered what my actual problem with symfonium is. It wasn’t opus but the behaviour of symfonium itself.

No matter what i do, symfonium always downloads the original file (ALAC) instead of transcoding it to mp3.

I did reset my Airsonic-Advanced server to the default mp3 encoding settings, no bitrate limit for playerprofile of symfonium inside Airsonic. And i did what you told me and set the maximum quality in symfoniums transcoding and caching/download options to 320kbps.

Here comes the strange part: When i press cache song for offline playback, symfonium does download and cache the original file (lossless ALAC) and names it to .m4a in the offline folder. And when i use the “export to download folder” option on the cache download feature, it downloads the original file (lossless ALAC) but names it to .mp3 with ALAC audio inside.

Until now i did use dsub which just did what i told it to do: transcode and cache every song i told it to into 320 kbps mp3.

What do i need to do to get symfonium to do the same? Im extremely confused.

Screenshots:

Screenshot_20250415_131902
Screenshot_20250415_1319021080Ă—2340 262 KB

Screenshot_20250415_131914
Screenshot_20250415_1319141080Ă—2340 183 KB

aa-transcoding
aa-transcoding1320Ă—676 122 KB

dis forum is limited to 3 media elemts in one post so i have to split my post into two posts.

4

aa-players
aa-players1320Ă—726 67 KB

Audio file safed for offline cache (should be mp3 but is original ALAC file):

Screenshot_20250415_132004_Files
Screenshot_20250415_132004_Files1080Ă—2340 89.1 KB

Audio file safed for offline cache exported to downloads (should be mp3 but is original ALAC file only named .mp3):

Screenshot_20250415_132604_MiXplorer
Screenshot_20250415_132604_MiXplorer1080Ă—2340 93.2 KB

I did upload new logfiles.

Theres also the problem that after playing one or two songs, symfonium just stops playing new songs at all. It’s just stuck at loading.

Also when i start to play a song in symfonium, airsonic shows me the songs as played 4 times in a row, in the active playing queu.

5

You are facing a couple of limitations due to Airsonic not really embracing OpenSubsonic and do strange things API.

You have enabled Compatiblity mode, so you need to also enable the option to disable download endpoint as this one might not transcode.

For the playcounts it’s a bug in Airsonic not respecting the submission and always increasing the value even when it’s false.

6

Thanks for your answer. Sadly nothing is working. I did what you told me and disabled the download endpoint, nothing. I also tried to enable Transcode to mp3, nothing. No song will start playing.

Screenshot_20250415_204736
Screenshot_20250415_2047361080Ă—2340 252 KB

It feels like a lot of hoops someone has to jump throgh to be able to use symfonic with airsonic-advanced.

What should i do to make it work?

Thanks in advance

7

That’s another issue, you talked about download not being transcoded.

Airsonic does not respect some Subsonic behaviors and does not really seems interested in moving forward supporting OpenSubsonic to ensure consistency between servers.
Since I can’t force him to do so, I’d recommend to use a more modern server like LMS GitHub - epoupon/lms: Lightweight Music Server. Access your self-hosted music using a web interface. you’ll gain a lot of features in the process.

8

Thanks for the recommendation of LMS. My “Problem” is that im pretty much locked into Airsonic advanced, as no other music server has the advanced playlist management capabilities, multi-collection support etc. IM a heavy playlist user, and neither LMS nor Navidrome have good playlist management imo.

No other FOSS music server is as advanced as airsonic when it comes to flexibility.

I got Symfonium somewhat “working”. I have updated to the latest docker image of airsonic advanced and i am now able to play music and cache music, and the playcount issue seems to be gone as well. But some things still feel off and are strange. When a song which original file is ALAC on the server is cache by Symfonium it’s still downloaded as .m4a even though it has a 320kbps mp3 inside. And also Symfonium sometimes randomly shows either ALAC and 648kbps OR MP3 and 192kbps for a currently playing song. Even though its the same song. It just random. Which is pretty confusing cause i have nowhere set a kbps to 192 anywhere. I have set 320 kbps everywhere. So im wondering where that value and info is coming from.

Screenshot_20250415_212856
Screenshot_20250415_2128561080Ă—1498 312 KB

It seems to me that some of this randomness in how the cached files are handled is more of a problem of Symfonium and less of a problem of Airsonic.

So fyi: current airsonic-advanced docker image from linuxserver.io is working with current Symfonium version.

By all of this randomness i never feel comfortable to trust the player when playing music cause i never know if im currently streaming big ALAC files via mobile or not.

Also the distinction between offline cache and playback cache is somewhat confusing as well.

As a long time premium Yatse user i was hyped about Symfonium, but some behaviors are not consistent enough for my taste. So i guess i have to stick to Dsub2000 for the moment. Even though i would love to use Symfonium instead!

I would love to revisit Symfonium in the future, but i guess that’s not possible without buying it cause once the trial version is running i dont know how to stop it or reset it. Is there a way to stop or reset the trial period?

I came across one suspicious problem that REALLY bothered me. After submitting multiple log files in the past 24 hours, i got 3 security alerts by my system. Someone tried to log into my instance by an unknown IP that belongs to a known suspicious proxy network.

2025-04-15 21:07:41.144  INFO --- o.a.p.s.GlobalSecurityConfig             : Login failed from [172.20.10.13X]
2025-04-15 21:28:15.221  INFO --- o.a.p.s.GlobalSecurityConfig             : Login failed from [172.20.10.13X]
2025-04-15 21:30:35.462  INFO --- o.a.p.s.GlobalSecurityConfig             : Login failed from [172.20.10.13X]

After noticing this fact i consulted the logfiles that Symfonium has created and sent to your servers. And indeed there is a whole bunch of things in the logfiles that should be redacted and which aren’t necessary to be transmitted. The hostname and/or IP from my server should be redacted by the app and NOT be transmitted. There is no need for you to collect the hostanmes/ip’s on the logs. Also theres a lot of information about my music collection (artists, album, tracks etc) in the logfiles that is also being transmitted. Im pretty sure thats not needed for basic log files. Before submitting the logfiles i never had some stranger randomly trying to login to my instance before in the past 10 years. Nobody even knows the hostnames. How many people on your team have access to the logfiles? Is it possible that you have a security issue and someone is accessing certain information’s on your servers like the users logiles? Did you or someone on your team tried to login into my instance today? I hope you take this matter serious, and investigate it properly. Please let me know about what you have found.

9

For the record I’m the initiator of OpenSubsonic that all major servers have joined except Airsonic :wink:

You are free to not see that strangely updating your docker image fixed most of the things and yet still somehow blame Symfonium at this point I don’t really care anymore.

But the app works perfectly fine with servers that do not do random things :wink: The 192kb is from the server, but let’s blame Symfonium it’s easier.

So the actual normal TL;DR; would be that you ask again Airsonic to join OpenSubsonic and fix the details [Feature Request]: OpenSubsonic support · Issue #184 · kagemomiji/airsonic-advanced · GitHub (And at the same time the slow search endpoint slowing down the sync with Symfonium).

For the logs, there’s only me and no there’s no security issue, and yes the hostnames are necessary unfortunately because 90% of the users have no idea how networks and certificates works and the data is necessary to explain them why their wrong setup does not work.

Edit: And of course, after reading the actual IPs:

172.16.0.0/12
Name
PRIVATE-ADDRESS-BBLK-RFC1918-IANA-RESERVED
They are only intended for use within a private context and traffic that needs to cross the Internet will need to use a different, unique address.

No actual internet provider will route those …

10

I think we are talking past each other, and i want to apologize for that because that is also partly my fault for not communicating everything detailed enough. Yes, updating to the absolute latest snapshot of airsonic did fix the playback issue. But what i am talking about above (caching mp3 offline files as alac/flac extensions with mp3 lame inside) is not exclusive to airsonic. It happens with the navidrome as well. So this is in fact a Symfonium related topic. When playing a FLAC file from navidrome, symfonium flip flopped between showing FLAC and MP3 back and forth while playing the song.

Since subsonic servers were prominently advertised on your website and the app store, i had the misconception this does include airsonic. After consulting the FAQ, i saw that you recommend against it. MY BAD!

Im not here to fight or argue, and as the dev you most likely know most things better than i do. But you also should be open to accept when your app shows some odd behavior when tested with one of the number one recommended media servers (navidrome). All im saying is that it confuses people when stuff like this happens, you can do with this feedback whatever fits your needs. You can either use it to make your app better (caching mp3 files with the right extension instead of flac, fixing the flip flop displaying different audio codecs while playing music) or you can be ignorant about it and just say that im stupid. Im fine with both. No hard feelings.

I did knew before that you are the initiator of the opensubsonic project, and i absolutely agree that Airsonic needs to change and develop for the better. Airsonic needs to join OpenSubsonic 100%. You and i are in the same boat about that. My needs about certain features just make hard for me to switch the media server. I would love to only use a floss media server, but maybe i should give plex a try and see if it has the playlist capabilities i need, so i can ditch airsonic.

Depending the IP address issue, you are right. I didn’t knew it was a Bogon IP. It was late yesterday and i only slept like 4 hours, so i didn’t had the time or energy to fully investigate. My quick review just showed me a fraud score and the fact that a suspecious proxy/vpn was detected and it freaked me the F out. My bad!

Screenshot_20250416_102401-bogon-ip
Screenshot_20250416_102401-bogon-ip884Ă—305 37.7 KB

At some point, i will most likely buy symfonium in the future. I hope that when the time has come that you will give me an option to renew the trial period again before buying it. I hope we can have a better/new start when i will revisit your app in the future.

Only the best,
sonic

11

To resume you now have a different issues and could open an issue with logs and details about said issue ? :wink: I’m not aware of any such issues so can’t do anything about it :wink:

I can’t guess what you do, the file extension does not matter for internal cache, for external cache it’s based on what the Subsonic server returns via the API :wink:

For the trial you get 1 day after each update / reinstall to test fixes.

I would not recommend Plex at this time or ever :slight_smile: But you can test more LMS and make request there @itm is active and fully embrace OpenSubsonic.

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