I’ve been reviewing streamers for an hi-fi magazine recently and stumbled upon Symfonium - it’s the most beautiful app I’ve ever seen, really. Better than any streamer app or even MusicBee (Windows), which was my reference.
Now, quite a few hi-fi streamers have poor UPNP implementations, with no attention to “setNextURI”, so you can’t get gapless playing.
I know this is not Symfonium’s fault - but Foobar managed to get an workaround on this issue, by sending a continuous stream instead of track by track. You don’t get artwork or any track info on the streamer’s display but it’s ALWAYS gapless.
Is there any chance to implement this option on Symfonium? Something like “send continuous stream on upnp”? I know, hi-fi brands should implemente better protocols, but it’s the way it is.
Anyway on mobile this is way harder as transcoding requires a lot more power and network bandwidth.
And the we face the same issues of the renderer advertising some supported format that they don’t properly.
So while it can mostly be done by transcoding all to an stereo mp3 stream the loss of quality is not worth it in most of the case.
Well it can via mp3 but people who cast to upnp and want gapless usually also want high quality.
Decoding high quality audio from a server + transcoding + outputing as as raw PCM would not work without wifi 6 and high end device. (Even worse with multi channels flac)
So either low quality or very limited usage. And in both case very hard to implement and maintain.