Streaming & audio quality

Direct play & transcoding

BeetstreamNext serves files directly when a client can play them as-is, and transcodes on the fly via FFmpeg otherwise (bitrate limit requested by the client, unsupported format, etc.). You can set never_transcode to always stream the original file regardless of what the client asks for.

Direct play means fully lossless, bit-perfect streaming: FLAC, ALAC, and other lossless formats are sent to the client byte-for-byte exactly as they sit in your library.

Adaptive-bitrate HLS

For clients that request it, BeetstreamNext supports OpenSubsonic’s HLS spec and can serve AAC HLS with adaptive bitrate, allowing the client’s player switch quality on the fly as network conditions change.

ReplayGain

BeetstreamNext can apply ReplayGain normalization server-side during transcoding, independent of whether the client itself supports ReplayGain or not:

• replaygain_enabled turns this on.
• replaygain_preamp adds extra gain (dB) on top of the tag value.
• replaygain_fallback is the gain applied to tracks that have no ReplayGain tag in Beets.
• audio_peak_limit prevents the result from clipping (peaks capped at 0 dB) regardless of the gain applied.

Encoding errors detection & self-healing streams

A background scan (also triggerable on-demand from the admin panel) probes files for decode errors. If a track is flagged, it is automatically routed through a transcode pass instead of direct play, so a corrupt/broken file doesn’t just fail to play.

This healing pass keeps the original container/codec (when the client doesn’t ask for something else): a flagged FLAC or ALAC file is re-encoded through FFmpeg’s decoder rather than streamed byte-for-byte, but the output stays lossless.

Reverse-proxy file offloading

Direct (non-transcoded) file serving can be offloaded to the reverse proxy instead of streaming bytes through the Python process, via X-Accel-Redirect (Nginx) or X-Sendfile (Apache). See Reverse proxy & CORS) for how to setup.

See the configuration reference for any of the settings mentioned here.