FAQs & Known Gotchas

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 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.

Encoding of special characters in filenames

In very rare circumstances it can happen that the way some special characters are encoded in filenames in your faircamp site is subtly changed during upload to the server, leading to that file not being accesible from the faircamp site, although present. Concretely speaking, this has been observed by someone who used Cyberduck to upload their site. One song containing "å" was not accessible because it was encoded as just "å" on their computer, but converted to "a" + "°" during upload (a perfectly valid and visually indistinguishable way to encode the character using unicode). If you're observing something similar, try using another FTP client (or rsync), and/or it should theoretically also be possible to configure Cyberduck (or another application) to not do this conversion on upload.