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[Peter Engrav]

Library Server running at home. Listening at work. Music collection is all FLAC. Outbound internet connection at home insufficently speedy to "keep up". Took me forever (lame, I know) to do the math figure out what the stutters and pauses were. Turned on "Audio Conversion" to ~320kpbs MP3. All good. Except that now of course whenever I switch to a new song there's an exasperating pause while LAME does its work on the server at home. Is there any way to get MC to cache the MP3 files thus generated somewhere?

[Matt]

Library Server running at home. Listening at work. Music collection is all FLAC. Outbound internet connection at home insufficently speedy to "keep up". Took me forever (lame, I know) to do the math figure out what the stutters and pauses were. Turned on "Audio Conversion" to ~320kpbs MP3. All good. Except that now of course whenever I switch to a new song there's an exasperating pause while LAME does its work on the server at home. Is there any way to get MC to cache the MP3 files thus generated somewhere?

If you have build 64 or newer on both ends, playback should start quickly.  Conversion does not need to finish for playback to start.

This is from 15.0.64:
Optimized: Starting playback with a Library Server client is faster when converting to MP3.

The server does cache files it streams for a few minutes so a subsequent request for the same resource will not do any conversion.

[Peter Engrav]

Great! That's some service. I'm still on 58.

I was going to "vote" (yes, I do get it's not a democracy ) for a future feature-ette where I can check a box somewhere to make that cache be permanent (based on space, last for a few weeks instead of a few minutes). But as I think about it a moment longer, as soon as the process is somewhat pipelined that cache doesn't really buy you a great deal of user-visible performance. It just reduces CPU load on the server. Which at the moment I (and I suspect most) are miles and miles from worrying about, as the machine in question isn't really doing much else.

[Matt]

We would like to tie the handheld cache / stack system into the server conversion system, but I'm not sure when this will happen.

Like you said, the CPU usage of doing a conversion to MP3 for real-time playback doesn't stress a modern system very much.