Does such a beautiful proggy exist? I'd love to be able to stream my flac or ape collection to a client at work without using a lot of bandwidth. It'd be perfect if one of the many servers out there could actually transcode the files on the fly while transmitting them (and of course not keeping them). Does such a wonder exist?

Hi. If I'm not mistaken, that's exactly how SHOUTcast/Icecast streaming works.

The streaming source encodes whatever music you have, and then streams the encoded material to the streaming server. Clients connect to the server to listen to music.

The streaming source will encode your lossless files on the fly before streaming them.


If you use Windows:
If you use Winamp2, and would like to stream MP3 streams, have a look at the SHOUTcast docs. You'll need the SHOUTcast DSP for Winamp2, and the SHOUTcast server.

If you use foobar2000, and would like to stream Ogg Vorbis streams, have a look at ODDSOCK.org. You'll need the oddcast2 DSP for foobar2000, and the Icecast2 server.

If you use *nix:
Have a look at icecast.org. You can use icecast and ices to stream MP3, or icecast2 and ices2 to stream Vorbis.

I've been thinking about this for a while as well.

kjoonlee is right in the sense that if you want to stream it over a network then shoutcast/icecast/etc is a good solution. However I think that a virtual filesystem (note: I'm talking about linux/bsd here) similar to devfs or procfs would be an cool solution. So you have all your lossless files on your hard drive somewhere, but then you also have a filesystem mounted that contains all your files in "mp3", "ogg", etc. When you try to read from these files, you're actually reading from your lossless files seemlessly transcoded into the desired format. This would be a great way to keep your entire collection in FLAC (for example) but still be able to copy any file to a portable device that only supports mp3's. All without wasting any addtional space.

Now if only I knew enough to write my own virtual file system driver...

*drools*

I would love to have that.

It would also probably have to have a database ala foobar2000, but if it did, then it would be the perfect solution.

Incidentally, I think it would also be possible under win2k/xp - there are programs like Daemon Tools that mount CD/DVD images as virtual drives - I don't see any reason why similar techniques couldn't be used for transcoding.

It would be a great way to make an encoder frontend, too - instead of dropping onto a program, just copy the virtual file over to a real drive.

There's already a Samba VFS module that transcodes lossless to WAV for playback

sourceforge samba vfs

Might be of use as a starting point...