Plex Transcoder Running During "Original" Quality Sync

General Discussions
1

Hello everyone,

I recently picked up a Galaxy Note8 but have been running Plex on other devices for a long time. I grabbed a PlexPass subscription so I could sync my entire music library to this device. I don’t think I necessarily have a problem, but I’m wondering why the Plex Transcoder is “converting” everything when I chose to sync at “Original” quality from the app on the device. I’m fine with it putting things into new containers if that’s necessary, but I am definitely concerned with quality loss as I have a mix of lossy and lossless files. I have a wide mix of anything from Apple Lossless, AAC, MP3, WAV, FLAC, etc…

Is anything actually being converted into another format, or is “converting” just the verbage the server uses during sync regardless of whether conversion is occurring or not?

I guess TLDR: I don’t care about remuxing as long as audio quality is not affected, should I be worried?

2

I found my issue. Android does not support ALAC playback. Didn’t think this was an issue as I used to use Poweramp which had no problems with this. So it appears that the Plex app offers no playback codecs itself. I know I can download media players that support this, but is there a way to add the codecs so Plex and other applications can sync and playback these files without needing their own built in support?

3

So for anyone who searches something similar in the future, save yourself the hassle. I converted all of my ALAC files to FLAC as I have no Apple devices in my workflow anymore (obviously you’d do the opposite with an Apple environment). Additionally, mobile devices have issues with ADPCM WAV files, so those should be converted into a lossless format as well. Check the supported formats for your device.

My only gripe about the situation is that Plex was pretty unclear regarding the issue, I needed to dig through logs to figure out what was wrong. Since each device type is configured with an XML profile, I don’t think it’s too much to ask for Plex to flag you down when you hit sync with a “Hey! That’s not going to work for your device.” ALAC wasn’t terribly surprising for an Android phone, but ADPCM was a little.

So a couple tips in hindsight:

  1. If you are syncing at original quality in Plex and it converts anything, something is wrong. Dig into the logs right away because Plex will give you a generic “Something went wrong!” type error while continuing to choke on the transfer. :smiley:

  2. The Plex Sync function is shaky at best. Even with all my ducks in a row regarding correct file formats, I had to poke at it now and again since it would stop downloading or think that the sync was complete. Granted I’m doing my initial sync of about 6000 items, but just keep that in mind. I’ve never had problems with smaller batches, so I don’t expect further issues.

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4

I’m syncing 7700+ music files at original (lossless) quality mostly FLAC but I do have some WAV files in there and saw it was converting. So that answered why it was “converting”.