My Sonos S2 setup supports native FLAC (direct plays in Plex) but my wireless network (Sonosnet) struggles to handle things when I have more than two rooms playing their stereo pairs. I get dropouts and the usual not great behavior. Therefore I’m wondering, is there a way to force Plex always to transcode my lossless FLAC library down to a high quality lossy format? Sacrilege, I know, but I think it would be fine and unnoticeable for the most part.
I think audio is referred to as Direct Stream, while video is Direct Play.
What you’re asking to do sounds like disable Direct Stream for those players.
I don’t have Sonos, just a guess.
I don’t think this is currently possible in Plex+Sonos. I checked to see if the old-style Sonos.xml profile could be modified, but I’m not sure that’s still relevant, and the “enriched” request from the Sonos service adds FLAC back anyway.
I don’t have any trouble playing FLAC to multiple speakers/groups/stereo pairs. I have the best luck with SonosNet when only one Sonos device is connected to Ethernet.
But I also have decent luck when using Sonos S2 on WiFi directly (no Ethernet to ANY Sonos devices), and I’ve seen Reddit posts that it fixed their FLAC issues. It’s obviously very situational.
It would be significantly more complicated, but the proxy technique described by @sixxnet here would likely work - the request for FLAC could be stripped out.
Default All Clients to Max Internet Streaming - #1046 by sixxnet
Jun 22, 2022 15:47:33.294 [0x80b164300] DEBUG - Request: [3.80.144.180:35185 (WAN)] GET /music/:/transcode/universal/decision?hasMDE=1&partIndex=0&mediaIndex=0&directPlay=1&protocol=hls&path=%2Flibrary%2Fmetadata%2F188089 (7 live) TLS Signed-in Token (Username) (Plex for Sonos)
Jun 22, 2022 15:47:33.294 [0x80b164300] DEBUG - [Transcode] TranscodeUniversalRequest: adapting profile with augmentation data: add-transcode-target(type=musicProfile&context=streaming&protocol=hls&container=mpegts&audioCodec=aac)+add-direct-play-profile(type=musicProfile&container=mp4&audioCodec=aac,mp3,alac)+add-direct-play-profile(type=musicProfile&container=mp3&audioCodec=mp3,mp2)+add-direct-play-profile(type=musicProfile&container=flac&audioCodec=flac)+add-direct-play-profile(type=musicProfile&container=ogg&audioCodec=vorbis)+add-direct-play-profile(type=musicProfile&container=asf,wma&audioCodec=wmav2)+add-limitation(scope=musicCodec&scopeName=*&type=upperBound&name=audio.samplingRate&value=48000)+add-limitation(scope=musicCodec&scopeName=*&type=lowerBound&name=audio.samplingRate&value=8000)+add-limitation(scope=musicCodec&scopeName=*&type=match&name=audio.samplingRate&list=8000|11025|16000|22050|24000|32000|44100|48000)+add-limitation(scope=musicCodec&scopeName=*&type=upperBound&name=audio.channels&value=2)+add-limitation(scope=musicCodec&scopeName=*&type=upperBound&name=audio.bitDepth&value=16)+add-limitation(scope=musicCodec&scopeName=*&type=upperBound&name=audio.bitrate&value=1411)+add-limitation(scope=musicCodec&scopeName=wmav2&type=upperBound&name=audio.bitrate&value=355)+add-limitation(scope=musicCodec&scopeName=mp3,aac,vorbis&type=upperBound&name=audio.bitrate&value=320)+add-limitation(scope=musicCodec&scopeName=mp3&type=lowerBound&name=audio.samplingRate&value=16000)
Thanks. I’m filing these thoughts until AFTER I complete a planned network upgrade. I have been using an Orbi mesh with wireless backhaul. Orbi really sucks on the firmware side and as you probably know, it’s important that both the hardware and firmware work! Also, wireless backhaul is not great. I’m replacing everything and installing cat6 for backhaul. It’s possible my Sonos issues will disappear when I do that.
I’m using eero mesh with wireless backhaul myself.
Dumb question - have you tried changing which channel SonosNet uses?
Oh yes, I did the whole Wifi Explorer thing and carefully planned channel usage. My conclusion is that wireless backhaul sucks from the perspectives of stability and latency. Wired backhaul is the way to go. It’s much faster, has lower latency and is more stable.
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Most of those tools can only see WiFi networks, not other utilization or interference in the ISM radio bands.
Sometimes all of the other WiFi networks are on the same channel for a reason - they might be dodging something worse than WiFi.
Wireless mesh can work! I abandoned my MoCA devices because they occasionally had problems of their own. I thought I’d be angry but it’s been reliable and stable. I have the equipment to install Ethernet, but everything is working - so I’m not going to crawl under the house.
I think eero has the best actual mesh and approach to wireless backhaul, and I’d recommend it to anybody that doesn’t want to mess with their router or choose channels manually.
But agreed. Real wired Ethernet never gets interference from the neighbor’s baby monitor or surround speakers or airport radar. Wiring APs has tons of potential advantages.
I relocated my cable modem and first mesh router to a central point in my basement, anticipating adding wired backhauls from there to other mesh points. For now I’m still running wireless backhauls to two other mesh points. I connected my Boost at that central location. It made an amazing difference even though it’s coming up from the basement to reach speakers on the first floor. I have no problems anymore with FLAC, even when streaming to up to three rooms with stereo pairs. I can only surmise that SonosNet is sensitive to latency and this relocation reduced latency enough to improve performance significantly.
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nice job. the day apple locked developers out of the iOS WiFi advanced stats like S/N ratio was so brutal the internet still hasn’t recovered.
Quick followup here. Wired backhauls are in place and coincidentally I switched to fiber WAN. I moved my boost from a central point in the basement (where I have my switch) to a central point on the first floor, where most of my speakers reside. Sonos remains very stable and awesome with FLAC of various resolutions. Long story short for the benefit of any future searchers, look closely at your network, especially if you have any wireless leg prior to Sonosnet.
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