Nimble Streamer Playout now supports FLAC input

Our team recently expanded the format support in Nimble Streamer with FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec). It can now be ingested via Enhanced RTMP and delivered via SLDP without transcoding. In addition to that, FLAC files can now be used as input sources in Nimble Playout and delivered as live SLDP streams. The audio is passed through as-is – no transcoding, no quality loss. What goes in is exactly what comes out.

Until now, engineers working with FLAC assets would need to convert them before bringing them into a Playout workflow. That step is no longer necessary.

Use cases

High-quality music streaming. If you’re running a music station or an internet radio service and your library is in FLAC, you can now feed those files straight into Playout and deliver lossless audio to listeners over SLDP.

Broadcast playout with master-quality assets. Broadcasters who receive or archive content in FLAC no longer need a conversion step before scheduling playback. The Playout module accepts them natively.

Low-latency audio delivery. SLDP’s low-latency characteristics pair well with lossless audio for scenarios where both quality and responsiveness matter – curated listening sessions, or professional monitoring feeds.

Adding FLAC into Playout

If you’re already running Nimble, upgrade it to the latest version.

Get familiar with full documentation for Nimble Streamer Playout regarding initial setup and requirements.

Further workflow is straightforward:

1. Add your FLAC files to a Nimble Streamer Playout channel as input sources, the same way you would with other supported audio formats. See example below
2. Configure the SLDP output setup as described in this documentation, using Playout stream as input.
3. Play the live stream via the Nimio player. You can use this Nimio demo page to test the stream first and then embed it into your workflow using GitHub repo instruction.
4. Republish via RTMP: you can republish resulting live output via RTMP into other destinations which support FLAC in RTMP.

Nimble handles the rest – the FLAC audio is passed through directly into the SLDP live stream without any transcoding stage in between.

Playout config example

Here’s a short config example that you can use for FLAC files processing.

{
  "SyncInterval": 1000,
  "Tasks": [
    {
      "Stream": "live/stream",
      "Blocks": [
        {
          "Id": "1",
          "Start": "2026-05-01 08:16:41",
          "Streams": [
            {
              "Type": "vod",
              "Source": "/home/user/content/mp4/flac_intro_track.mp4"
            },
            {
              "Type": "vod",
              "Source": "/home/user/content/mp4/flac_stereo_sample.mp4"
            },
            {
              "Type": "vod",
              "Source": "/home/user/content/mp4/flac_highrate_demo.mp4"
            },
            {
              "Type": "vod",
              "Source": "/home/user/content/mp4/flac_archive_cut.mp4"
            },
            {
              "Type": "vod",
              "Source": "/home/user/content/mp4/flac_live_republish.mp4"
            }
          ]
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

It just plays FLAC files one by one.

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That’s it. Contact our helpdesk in case you have any questions about Playout setup or Nimble Streamer in general.