<html><head></head><body><div>Situation: </div><ul><li>remote virtual server with very little storage (estimate: I can spare about 40G for music)</li><li>local music collection of ~80G in all sorts of formats - lossy in varying quality, some lossless too</li></ul><div><br></div><div>Vision:</div><ul><li>stream my whole music collection randomized so I can listen to it anywhere</li></ul><div><br></div><div>Plan/Idea:</div><ul><li>Locally transcode everything to <b>one</b> format that results in files that are </li><ul><li>small enough to fit on my server, altogether</li><li>have a reduced bitrate for streaming</li><li>can be streamed as-is without further transcoding</li></ul><li>Upload</li><li>Set icecast up to do just that (this I know how to do)</li></ul><div><br></div><div>So I'm asking advice for the transcoding. What's likely to give the best results with already lossy sources, and at small bitrates?</div><div><br></div><div>According to these documents:</div><div><a href="https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/HighQualityAudio">https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/HighQualityAudio</a></div><div><a href="https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Transcoding#Lossy-to-lossy_transcoding">https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Transcoding#Lossy-to-lossy_transcoding</a></div><div>it basically comes down to Fraunhofer Institute's FDK AAC, but the articles are dated.</div><div>Opus is supposed to be good but I always have the impression it doesn't deal well with loud/grungy/fuzzy/guitarry music, esp. at low bitrates.</div><div><br></div><div>What do you say?</div><div><br></div><div><span></span></div></body></html>