I have seen this asked a few times and more recently with the release of Sonic Sage but I have not found a solution or answer to what is causing this. I apologise that this may be confusing, it’s an odd one to try and explain. I have included examples where I can.
I have been using plexamp with TIDAL (Hi-Fi) and local music for a while now without issue. I started playing with Sonic Sage last night and noticed that the tracks added to the queue/playlist are streamed in AAC 320 rather than the FLAC version that plays via the usual search function in plexamp.
I went to take some screenshots to provide examples but noticed that after playing the same track via search, the playlist version now plays in FLAC, but does not display the sample rate on the right-hand side, this I have never come across.
Here is the track played from the search
And this is the same track that was AAC 320 before playing from search, which now displays FLAC but without the sample rate information on the right.
Upon further investigation, It seems that playing the Discovery radio plays AAC 320 versions despite the tracks on TIDAL being FLAC, this can be the case for some tracks within the same album, whereas on TIDAL the whole album is FLAC. - an example of this is the album ‘Collide With The Sky’ by Pirce the Viel, where the last track on the album ‘Hold On Till May’ was played via Discovery Radio and is now stuck playing AAC 320 no matter which route I take to play the song. The rest of the album, which was not first played in Discovery, plays in its FLAC format as expected. - I have checked via the TIDAL app and the track in question plays in its FLAC version.
Is there a reason this is occurring? Is it expected functionality, if so why is this? From what I can see there is nothing in my settings that should be preventing the maximum quality to be played.
Any input is appreciated as it is causing me a lot of confusion.
