Downgrading FLAC? Are you insane?

I'd go for MP3 V0 instead of 320kbps. Most will agree that the quality is the same but the size difference is quite noticable. I mean as long as you're going lossy, you might as well be efficient with it and not throw away space.

I tried Lidarr but gave up on it and I'm just using Beets right now for organizing and converting my stuff. I don't download music so often and a bit manual work isn't an issue for me. I use FDK AAC and encode everything to VBR4 which is then available in Navidrome, but keep the FLACs of course.

I suggest you convert them to AAC with Apple's excellent QAAC encoder instead. fre:ac can do it just fine once you add the encoder. Much better and more modern format than MP3, and still universally playable.

I just use ffmpeg to re-encode flac files to 320kbps MP3s

for %A in (*.flac) do ffmpeg -i "%~nA.flac" -b:a 320k "%~nA.mp3"

Why even live if you can't listen to FLAC? Just upgrade your network.

320 is fine, I know technically the difference between FLAC and 320 is hard to show, but I think the tracks I have in FLAC are encoded better or something, they just sound better overall.

beets has a convert plugin, plus beets in general is great. Would recommend. Typically storage is relatively cheap so instead of getting rid of your FLACs, why not transcode them all to a separate folder/library, and point your server at that and not the FLAC library?

Just use LAME for that

Plexamp automatically downgrade the bitrate of your music when streaming via cellular. By default it uses an OPUS codec with 128kbps bitrate. If you still want to convert your FLACs into mp3 you can check Foobar2000, it's free and has a lot of options for converting music files.

I wish I had just gone with 320kbps in the beginning, it's not like I own any audio equipment that is sufficient in quality.

I think this might be what you're looking for: https://stackoverflow.com/a/42874649

You can download ffmpeg here: https://ffmpeg.org/download.html

My upload is 50mbps and I wouldn't say I have issue streaming it, it's that it isn't as instant for the next song on Australian Broadband, more like +1s.

Setting transcode defaults don't save any time either, the main consideration is that my family don't have good internet and 320kbps would just be more efficient as it really doesn't sound any better for 3x the size.

Lidarr should be able to do that, in your Profile settings put 320 as a higher priority than flac in the upgrade until section, that'll replace flac with mp3 as it finds it

If you're having trouble streaming flac with one person I can't imagine having multiple people streaming mp3 is going to be any better though, if it's bandwidth you'll run into the same thing otherwise if it's hardware, better to find out why it's not seamless and fix it.

um just enable transcoding on your server. no need to downgrade.