Frequently Asked Questions

Why does faircamp transcode audio files into more formats than I requested?

You might have observed that faircamp generally transcodes audio files into multiple formats, and in fact, more than one requests. For instance if you have a release for which you requested release downloads in MP3 format only, this is what you might be seeing in faircamp's output:

[TRANSCODING] "Release/Track.mp3" to Opus 96
[TRANSCODING] "Release/Track.mp3" to MP3 V5
[TRANSCODING] "Release/Track.mp3" to MP3 V0

The reason for this is streaming formats. Faircamp provides streaming assets (the audio files that visitors listen to when they play your audio directly from the website player) primarily in Opus format (because of its high efficiency, see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opus_(audio_format) and/or opus-codec.org/comparison) and as a fallback also in MP3 (this is because Apple/Safari does not support Opus in the way that every other browser and system does). If you have requested MP3 downloads, there will still be two transcodes to MP3 formats happening because for streaming, a significantly lower bitrate is used, to reduce both load time for visitors and bandwith usage on your server.