New User, Playlist not reliably syncing to Opus from Navidrome

Issue description:

On the back-end I have Navidrome running with my library of ~26k FLAC tracks. I created a playlist called JoeSync and added ~500 songs that I’d like to sync to my Android 16 Pixel 8. I configured my licensed Symfonium to connect to my Navidrome instance, with default settings and it syncs and shows all the tracks fine. I imported the JoeSync playlist, it shows the proper number of tracks. I configured the playlists Offline cache and download to use Quality 128kbps, as well as Automatic offline cache.

I’d like for my entire JoeSync playlist to be downloaded as 128kbps Opus on my Pixel 8 phone so I can play those songs regardless of network connectivity. In Symfonium when I do a ‘Details’ on any track in the playlist it shows it as ‘Offline cached’ ‘From auto offline rule’, but it shows the MIME type as flac. The earliest tracks in the playlist still seem to play fine, but later tracks either don’t play at all, or play for about 2 seconds and then move to the next track, or error saying something about error due to not being able to playback that format, or ‘too many errors, stopping playback’.

I’m new to Navidrome and to Symfonium. Help!

Logs:

Upload description: jpfieber

Additional information:

 

 

Reproduction steps:

 
On the songs that stop after 2 seconds, the progress bar quickly goes all the way across the screen, so I’m guessing they aren’t fully transcoded. Other songs are. The ones that just skip and don’t play don’t seem to have a progress bar at all. All the files seem to say they are flac, so it seems they didn’t transcode at all.
 

Media provider:

Subsonic

Screenshots:

 

    

I noticed in my Navidrome logs that transcoding is ‘false’. “{“time”:“2026-02-08T21:46:17Z”,“level”:“info”,“msg”:“Streaming file”,“artist”:“Metallica”,“bitRate”:“0”,“cached”:“false”,“format”:“raw”,“originalBitRate”:“1043”,“originalFormat”:“flac”,“requestId”:“nixos-server/uhTaWBZkpR-001259”,“title”:“Disposable Heroes”,“transcoding”:“false”,“user”:“jpfieber”}

When I look at Settings/Players I see my Symfonium entry that lists my name, shows transcoding as ‘opus audio’ and the max bit rate as ‘128’. I have 128 set as maximum both for mobile and wifi.

There’s no download in the logs, the playback errors are due to incomplete files. Are you sure you have enough space free on the device ?

Yes, 116GB free on the phone.

The files are truncated, if the server returns an error or anything they are not kept, so something happened during the download. Logs don’t show that.

For the record you should not force transcoding server side and in Symfonium at the same time.

Clear the bad files from the cache and download them again.

I’m a noob with these two services. Which is best to do the transcoding (I’m thinking server to save on battery life)? How do I tell Symfonium to do it or not do it?

The server will always do it, but you need to keep the control on the client else you can’t be sure what actually happen.