B98 ARC while overseas and downloading of files - keeping the pressure on! :D

Hi just some kudos to the team here, ARC seems to be working a bit better lately, still a few lags here and there, but much better. My server is in New Zealand and I am in Colombia so it’s probably about as far as it gets, everything is pretty smooth. The only trap I’m falling into is there are now only two options for download quality which is really not working for me. It says original quality over wifi and lower quality over cellular. Fair enough, but it’s not very specific as this seems to be for streaming only (I assume) and the download quality is either gone or I’ve lost where it is located.

Logically, I want to download the music while on wifi before I go flying around with poor connections, but on a mobile device where storage space is at a premium, I don’t want this to be 24/96 (or worse). So I need to download lower quality over wifi (the opposite of the option I seem to have. I don’t know how you guys are going to do it, but it does seem we need a section for downloads and a section for streaming. Perhaps it’s there and I’m being blind today!

In anticipation I’ve bought a new phone with 128G on it - but even that is going to fill up quickly with high res audio.

Keep up the good work!

Marshalleq

Download quality setting never existed, it’s not implemented. Here is the feature suggestion thread:

And I have the same streaming quality settings in the new build 98 as ever (disable the Automatically setting and choose from the menu)

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Yes I have those ones - I thought there used to be a download quality setting or similar, clearly I was wrong! I do believe it’s something they’re working on, so I will just wait. Seems like a pretty important feature for a mobile music app, so I doubt they’ll leave it out for long now that ARC is here!

When you’re downloading music files with Roon ARC to your phone or tablet, they are coming from your local Roon library. How could Roon ARC download a different version? You may not have a Tidal or Qobuz account. Now, if you have multiple versions in your local library, I can see you would want to choose which version to download.

It could easily transcode on the core for the download. It already does it when streaming a lower-resolution version of the files when the streaming settings are so configured.

Just needs to be implemented, and it’s on the roadmap.

(When there is more than one local file version of an album, it is already possible to choose which version to download, by the way.)

Roon could downsample or upsample the file if that’s what you want. They could have a setting to downsample everything to CD quality, I suppose. Personally, I would not want less than that.

That’s not what I mean. The point is reducing file size for phone storage while maintaining as much fidelity as possible for a given size target, which can be FLAC or smaller lossy files as the user wants.

(You might not want lossy, others will - there’s something to be said for fitting a large library completely on the phone as 320 or lower kbps lossy files, as opposed to saving a subset of the library at larger size. ARC could even sync this from the core automatically so that the download library on ARC is always the same as the one on the core (obviously only the local files). I certainly can’t hear a meaningful difference between CD quality and 320 kbps lossy with noise cancelling phones on the train. Anyway, you have no local files :stuck_out_tongue: )

Therefore, convert from FLAC (or WAV if that’s the original file format) to mp3 or Opus (which they are using for streaming). In the very same way as any music converter can convert a FLAC to mp3 or what have you. Doing that on the core takes a few seconds per file, then download it.

It already does much the same thing when you stream a CD quality or higher local file from the core and have streaming settings to Balanced or lower. In this case, it does it on the fly in real time. It can do the same at full speed and save the result in an output file.

There is nothing unclear, unusual, or mysterious about this, just work that has to be spent on it, and they already confirmed that they will.

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