I am testing out Navidrome and Symfonium as a PlexAmp replacement. So far, very impressed!
However, I’m trying to understand what’s going on with data usage - specifically mobile data usage. In Symfonium I have Mobile maximum bitrate set to 256kbps, and have it set to pre-cache 2 tracks on mobile. These are similar settings to what I had in PlexAmp, yet I’m seeing much more mobile data usage from Symfonium.
As an example, this morning I was in the car listening to music for about 45 minutes or so. According to Navidrome logging, transcoding was requested correctly, and it delivered 256 opus. I counted about 12 tracks that were accessed while I was out. My phone provider reports my data usage for today to be 250MB. I wasn’t doing anything else with my phone while out like navigation or anything and have been on wifi since, so that number seems high to me for that number of songs at that bitrate.
I’m on a limited data plan, so would prefer not to use too much if not needed.
(I also had this experience earlier this week, almost identically, but didn’t have logging turned on, so didn’t ask about it then.)
Logs:
Upload description: Logs for high mobile data usage question
The logs covers a lot of things so it’s hard to tell, but I do not see anything very special there.
The only thing would be that you seemed to start playback with wifi connected, you should enable the option Playback/Decoding/Force instant transcoding to ensure the end of the current song and next one are never finished at current Wifi quality when you loose wifi.
Thanks for the response. I do have that setting enabled, and it does seem to be enabled as the Navidrome logs show transcoding for the first song. It sounds like you may have found the section I was talking about but in case it wasn’t clear, it was May 10, between 7:20 and 8:40AM, Pacific time.
Besides the audio, is there any other large data being transmitted? Obviously my provider doesn’t report uploaded data vs downloaded data, so I’m just assuming it’s the downloads.
I checked the network activity on the navidrome container, while running a test. I played two songs while my phone was on a mobile connection (so that navidrome transcoded from FLAC to OPUS 256). The songs were 3m56s and 4m33s, so 8m29s total. Docker reported network output of 37.8MB during the playing of the two songs (again, with pre-caching turned off for all connection types). I didn’t do any other navigation in the app during that time that would have loaded images, for example.
I then converted those two FLAC files into OPUS 256K using ffmpeg, and the resulting files were 7.2MB and 8.4MB, respectively, total 15.6MB. So over double the audio file size was transferred over the wire while streaming. I understand streaming introduces overhead, but would not expect that overhead to be over 100%.
That’s a possibility. Navidrome is running on a local machine, but I’m using tailscale to make it available via a VPS.
I just repeated the test using only the Navidrome web client, with forced transcoding to opus 256, and it behaved as expected and transferred around 17MB. What I noticed with Symfonium was that on initial playback, it would transfer seemingly the entire file size, and then as it got close to the end of the track, it would do so again, as if it were downloading twice.
Thanks again for looking at it, I’ll use the Navidrome web client for now while I look into proxy.