I would very much like Roon to support mp2 files.
When I had Core installed on my MacBook, I came around the problem by renaming the audio-files (tracktitle.mp2.mp3), which made Roon recognize the file as a mp3 file.
After installing ROCK on a NUC this workaround no more works - probably because of the codec used by ROCK. So for now I convert all my mp2 files to Flac.
Still a workaround I know, but would it not be better to convert them to MP3 files?
Not unless there is a way to go from mp2 to mp3 without additional loss. I do not know if this is possible. mp2 to Flac seems sensible to avoid further degradation?
Hi again, I just did some reading on this and your right.
MP2 encodes audio in the time domain, MP3 does it frequency domain so although they have the same MPEG file format the two codecs are different.
And thus transcoding MP2 to MP3 will introduce more losses, whether that is significant I’m not sure, but I’d be concerned about introducing more losses as well.
Seeing as it literally takes a few minutes to do, listen to a sample with MP2, MP3 and FLAC and see if any difference is obvious. My guess is there won’t be an appreciable difference.
The OP has good reasoning for mp2 renamed with mp3 extension in my view. This worked when he had Roon core on a Mac, but not on ROCK. What is different on Mac vs ROCK? My guess is a single (mp3) binary compiled with support for mp2 on a Mac and the same without mp2 support on ROCK. The best solution would be to enable the same mp2 support on ROCK as Mac version has.
Agreed, that’s why I started my reply with “still a workaround I know” … it was not suggested as a substitute.