possible LAME screw up

[Shredder]

Morning. I have been ripping all my music in FLAC (still not done with project). I recently moved the library from the hd on my desktop to a Thecus n5200 Pro NAS. In reading posts re: how to set up SS on the NAS, I understood that LAME encoder was necessary to run FLAC on the NAS. Hence, I installed LAME (the hardest part of the install). Now, I have read more about LAME and understand it to stream FLAC files as MP3s. Is that correct? Have I degraded the quality of my FLACs by downloading LAME? SHould I delete LAME? Is it necessary to Play FLACS? Am I hopelessly confused?

HELP.

Thanks.

[mflint]

Morning. I have been ripping all my music in FLAC (still not done with project). I recently moved the library from the hd on my desktop to a Thecus n5200 Pro NAS. In reading posts re: how to set up SS on the NAS, I understood that LAME encoder was necessary to run FLAC on the NAS. Hence, I installed LAME (the hardest part of the install). Now, I have read more about LAME and understand it to stream FLAC files as MP3s. Is that correct? Have I degraded the quality of my FLACs by downloading LAME? SHould I delete LAME? Is it necessary to Play FLACS? Am I hopelessly confused?

HELP.

Thanks.

No need to panic.

Lame is only needed if you *need* or *want* to play your lovely FLAC files as mp3s.

This may be because:
1. you have a slimp3 machine which only understands mp3 natively
2. you have a remote SB2, SB3 or Transporter and a low-bandwidth network connection to your server

By default, SlimServer will stream the unadulterated flacs to your SB2/SB3/Transporter.

Matthew

[Mitch G]

And, for SB1s, you can stream the flac as wav - also lossless.


Mitch

[Shredder]

OK. I have a TP and a SB3. Do I need to delete LAME or will it only play my Flacs as MP3s if I am using a slimp3 or box with low ban width?

[Shredder]

In other words, is there a way to disable LAME w/o deleting?

[snarlydwarf]

You don't need to disable it.

SC knows the 'capabilities' of players, and by default will only encode to mp3 if a player is incapable of doing FLAC or WAV (ie, if bandwidth limiting is on).

It will see "this is a FLAC" and "this player understands FLAC" and just stream it as is (assuming we're talking about an SB2 or later anyway.)

You haven't hurt anything, don't worry about it.

(The only way around this is to change the file conversion rules, to force it to always re-encode, but that is work... or to change it so that for a given player it will always re-encode... but again, you didn't do that.)

[Shredder]

Snarlydwarf. Thanks much.