Transcoded audio skips, questions about Make CPU Hurt, etc

[vsetter9]

I just got a shiny new phone with a ton of storage and went through the pain of syncing a large amount of music, with all the hanging and crashing that entails, over many many days, and I sat down to listen to it and Plex has introduced a HUGE number of skips and other blemishes to my audio.

If all I care about is the quality of transcoding lossless WMA to ‘original quality’ of whatever format Plex insists on transcoding my audio to, despite my phone supporting WMA, when SYNCING for offline use, rather than live streaming, am I better off with transcode quality set to ‘prefer higher quality encoding’ or ‘Make my CPU Hurt’? And are there other settings I should be checking to get rid of all the horrible skips I’m experiencing from synced versions of my pristine lossless WMA files?

I have a beefy computer, but I think you’ll grant that it isn’t anyone’s goal to hurt their CPUs unnecessarily, and yet this cheeky setting option doesn’t tell me what I can expect to gain from ‘Make My CPU Hurt’. Is that the highest quality setting? Or is that shooting for some combination of speed and quality that might be worse on quality than ‘prefer higher quality encoding’?

It seems like playing music without skips is like a bare minimum for a media server. Pardon my frustration, but any help would be greatly appreciated.

[vsetter9]

So after no response from Plex here, I deleted the music I’d spent 10+ days trying to sync and tried again with all the various transcoder settings, and every single one made skips and tempo jumps in the same places in the same songs. I don’t know if your transcoder works better with other file types, but my conclusion is that y’all can’t transcode WMA files with anything close to acceptable quality.

This software truly sucks at the most basic functions I’d expect (and you advertised) from a media server: music playback and sync. How can I get my money back? I’m feeling robbed and dupped.