I’ve realized that Plex only outputs 2-channel audio when playing my media. I have a small collection of multichannel albums, mostly ripped from SACDs or Blu-ray discs. These were converted to multichannel FLAC files (the SACDs were originally in .dsf format, but since Plex doesn’t support .dsf, I converted them to FLAC).
When I try to play these multichannel FLACs in Plex, they’re downmixed to stereo. Because of that, I use Kodi for these albums, which plays them properly in full surround.
That said, I much prefer Plex’s user interface and how it handles my library compared to Kodi.
So my question is: Will Plex ever support multichannel audio playback—specifically multichannel FLACs?
(For context, I’m running Plex on an NVIDIA Shield / Android TV.)
@gregg_p1 I have very similar setup (plex on nvidia shield, flacs from sacd). But I couldn’t make it working in Kodi either, my Denon AVR shows 2 channel input. Did you do any tunings or it just worked out of the box?
Edit: I set number of channels in Kodi settings to 5.1 and Kodi started sending 5.1 sound, so, it is not Nvidia shield. I tried to change multiple settings in Plex, none helped. So it seems this is something that should be addressed on Plex side. Note, multi channel tracks on video work fine with Plex, it’s just audio.
plex on android TV only supports surround audio when its in a video container.
the music player (which looks like its getting removed entirely soon) has NEVER supported anything but basic stereo, and it always resamples everything to 48khz.. and not well.
So for your surround music library, i;d recommend setting up kodi, disable all the other features and menu items in kodi that you dont need and just map your music library.
that plays everything, and on shield TV it plays as directly as possible,
5.1 Flac in 44.1? receiver gets a 5.1 PCM 44.1khz stream.
7.1 FLAC in 96KHZ? receiver gets a 7.1 PCM 96K stream.
Atmos in M4A container? no problem, both E-AC3 and TrueHD direct play just fine.
Same with DSF/DSD thought hey get converted to PCM even if your receiver/dac supports native DSD over HDMI, so they are probably best converted to PCM separately first to do a better conversion than decoding on the fly.
What do you mean by the music player is going to be removed soon?
And when you say everything is getting resampled to 48kHz, do you mean all of my regular CD tracks (FLACs) - 2 channel, 16-bit, 44.1 kHz are all getting resampled?
Plus, I have a bunch of tracks that are 2 channel, 24-bit, 48 kHz (and some are 96 or 192 kHz). Is Plex resampling all of these?
what does your recevier/dac say it is receiving when you play a 2ch 44.1/88.2/96 etc file?
how about 5.1 FLAC or Atmos in M4A ?
Plex are removing music (and photos) on their new apps, pushing people to Plexamp, which is fine for mobile as it’s a decent app and better than the main plex app for music. However, they currently have no plexamp for platforms like Android/googleTV to replace the functionality.
