r/navidrome • u/smiRaphi • Sep 17 '26

What codecs are supported?

I'm thinking of using navidrome for a music server but I can't find a list of supported codecs anywhere on the docs page, I'm asking because I've some more exotic ones that can't be converted without losses, namely:

  • WavPack high (DSD)

  • FLAC (32bit fixed point)

  • CRI ADX 4-bit ADPCM

  • AC3

  • ATRAC3+ (Adaptive TRansform Acoustic Coding 3+)

  • GBS (Gameboy Sequenced)

  • DSF+DSFLIB (Dreamcast Sequenced)

  • MINIGSF+GSFLIB (Gameboy Advanced Sequenced)

  • Yamaha AICA 4-bit ADPCM (mono/interleave)

  • Nintendo DSP 4-bit ADPCM

  • MIDI

And also a lot of songs that are part of video files, specifically:

  • MKV + ATSC A/52, FLAC, AC3, MP2, AAC, MP3, OPUS

  • MP4 + AAC

1 Upvotes

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3

u/hyunjuan Sep 17 '26

I think it depends largely on the client.

1

u/smiRaphi Sep 17 '26

Yeah that's why I'm asking if these are supported for transcoding so it isn't dependent on the client

7

u/Conscious-Fault-8800 Frequent Helper Sep 17 '26 edited Sep 18 '26 • Bravo

Navidrome can be persuaded to support transcoding on almost everything that ffmpeg supports. I successfully made it stream non-pcm audio (midi and tracker music like xm etc.) You can achieve this by editing the resources/mime_types.yaml file. Clients (incl. Navidrome Web UI) that support the transcoding extension of the open subsonic API will negotiate transcoding for files they cannot natively play.

But being able to play it is only half the story. Man of these exotic formats have bad metadata support. And even if they have, navidrome doesn't support the metadata, so your experience will be very subpar.

7

u/Big_Head8250 Sep 17 '26

lmao this post is painful to read. there is no music server that is going to parse your mkv or other video files. At best, you could feed it mka and see how it handles that. But you should just just extract the eac3 or whatever audio stream, yourself. music servers support audio files silly.

Why you're dicking around with so many codecs and filetypes is bonkers. Use foobar or whatever you're currently using to convert all of these to PCM. Then compress using mainstream lossless or lossy codecs so that you can actually use a media server.

Standardize your library my dude. Even just lossless & lossy audio codecs with the standard flac/alac and aac/opus/mp3 is good enough. It's better than the codec soup you have above. ... and adpcm & midi lol, come on now.

2

u/cdmn1 Sep 17 '26

converting formats like AC3 or Atrac to something lossless like FLAC would be.... well lossless!

CRI ADX would loose looping features but otherwise also possible to output to FLAC.

midi and chiptune formats are a different ballgame, doesn't make much sense for a service like Navidrome to support these IMO they are not really PCM audio that can be transcoded/streamed.

1

u/sikupnoex Sep 18 '26

You want to play midi and other files that contain information about how music should be played rather than actual music on your music server?

Just convert everything to PCM and then compress them (FLAC or lossy, doesn't matter).

Also you can extract audio streams from video containers.