So most of my collection of music is in FLAC, ALAC, and a small amount in AAC. The AAC tracks i will upload as is, but wondering what format to use to upload the lossless music in.

I don't want to use FLAC because it will take up lots of space, and I only have 30 GBs.

I plan to have two streams, one at 64 kbps AAC+ and another at 320 kbps MP3.

I know Centova re-encodes tracks, but does SAM Vibe? If it doesn't (which it shouldn't since crossfade isn't used... yet) if the bitrate and format of the song matches the output setting, will it just play that? Obviously, I won't have any tracks in 64 kbps AAC+, but if it saves a re-encode from happening, I'd put all the lossless tracks to 320 kbps MP3.

There is this step in the upload process that isn't defined at all in the user manual:

Does this mean it's encoded or just tagged? Please help.

If it's re-encoded anyways, I'll just upload the tracks at AAC 256 kbps VBR. Might as well get the best space and a 192 AAC sounds better than a 320 kbps file.

Thanks!

So I've tried uploading MP3s and FLACs and they don't seem to take up space. This makes me think SAM Broadcaster encodes them to a proprietary format so it's best to just let SAM Vibe handle the encoding? Is this the case?

For a definitive answer, please ask at the helpdesk.
But I'm pretty sure that processing also means reencoding the stuff for storage.

However, I doubt they store stuff in a proprietary format. The output in the end is AAC+, so I'd guess they store in AAC+ as well.

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The uploaded tracks are encoded as AAC and stored in the Cloud but this does not count as part of your storage amount, only uploaded tracks are included in your cloud storage. They are also normalized so the best format to upload would be AAC, they would still be encoded but this would lead to a track as close to the originally uploaded track as possible.

So what counts towards storage is the FLAC I uploaded or the re-encoded tracks. That doesn't make any sense. I did a test by uploading 38 files in FLAC that took up 1 GB of space on my computer. When I uploaded them, they took away 1 GB of space from my storage. But if they're stored at AAC, then they take nowhere near that much. So that doesn't make sense. What would make sense is if you didn't keep track of storage by GBs but if you did it by hours.

I don't like the idea of uploading AACs, having them converted to AAC again by SAM Vibe then it encodes it again to stream it. That's a lossy codec being converted twice. The quality will seriously degrade.

I'm all for uploading FLACs, but if it encodes them and still counts the file storage as FLAC, that isn't fair at all.

Only the tracks uploaded by the DJ in their original format count against the storage capacity. The normalized and encoded tracks are not stored in the station library and are not included in the library capacity.

So the original uploaded tracks are stored along with the encoded tracks?

Also, what bitrate of AAC do you recommend? And it is AAC LC?

Yes but only the uploaded tracks count against the storage.

It is AAC HE v2 and I would suggest that the bitrate depends on the bitrate you select from the Manage Relays tab within your station. If you set your Spacial relay to 64kbps then you might wish to use 64kbps as your track bitrate.

I ended up going with 256 kbps VBR AAC LC as I broadcast in 128 AAC V2, 64 kbps AAC+, and 320 kbps MP3.

I would like to say I would much prefer it if the system accepted FLAC files but only counted against your space the bitrate of the actual stored AAC file, which I sure hope is over 128 kbps. I really hate transcoding and wish Vibe didn't do it.