Supported Audio Formats

Submariner uses system APIs to play back audio. This means it's subject to whatever macOS supports. Apple provides a list of what was supported in 10.5. Basically, your typical MP3, AAC, ALAC, Wave, AC-3, and a bunch of legacy formats. In addition to these formats, FLAC is supported since about 10.13.

As of macOS 12, Opus is supported, but only in CAF or WebM files, not in the normal Ogg container format - practically, this means existing Opus files aren't supported without changing their container (but not re-encoding).

Vorbis is not supported by macOS.

Note that your server can transcode audio into a supported format (or lower bitrate, to save bandwidth). Not all servers implement this, but at least Subsonic and Navidrome do. Consult the documentation for your implementation.

Technical details

The results of AudioFileGetGlobalInfo on macOS 13.4:

Uniform Type Identifiers

(
    "com.apple.mpeg-4-ringtone",
    "public.aiff-audio",
    "public.mp4a-loas",
    "com.apple.m4a-audio",
    "public.3gpp2",
    "public.aac-audio",
    "com.apple.coreaudio-format",
    "public.ac3-audio",
    "public.au-audio",
    "public.mpeg-4",
    "public.enhanced-ac3-audio",
    "public.ulaw-audio",
    "org.3gpp.adaptive-multi-rate-audio",
    "public.aifc-audio",
    "public.mpeg-4-audiobooks",
    "public.3gpp",
    "com.digidesign.sd2-audio",
    "com.sony.wave64",
    "public.mpeg-4-audio",
    "public.mp2",
    "org.xiph.flac",
    "public.mp1",
    "public.mp3",
    "com.microsoft.waveform-audio"
)

File extensions

(
    m1a,
    adts,
    snd,
    aif,
    3gpp,
    aac,
    caff,
    ac3,
    aiff,
    3gp2,
    w64,
    caf,
    flac,
    mp1,
    mpa,
    3gp,
    mp2,
    au,
    wav,
    mov,
    aifc,
    3g2,
    mp3,
    m2a,
    mpg4,
    eac3,
    mp4,
    m4a,
    mpeg,
    loas,
    ec3,
    xhe,
    latm,
    m4b,
    m4r,
    amr,
    sd2,
    qt
)

MIME types

(
    "audio/vnd.wave",
    "audio/mp3",
    "audio/mpeg3",
    "audio/x-sd2",
    "audio/x-caf",
    "audio/mpeg",
    "audio/x-mpeg3",
    "audio/wav",
    "audio/flac",
    "audio/x-ac3",
    "audio/x-mpg",
    "audio/mp4",
    "audio/x-wav",
    "audio/x-aiff",
    "audio/x-eac3",
    "audio/eac3",
    "audio/usac",
    "audio/x-mpeg",
    "audio/wave",
    "audio/au",
    "audio/x-mp3",
    "audio/AMR",
    "audio/x-m4r",
    "audio/aiff",
    "audio/3gpp2",
    "audio/aac",
    "audio/mpg",
    "audio/ac3",
    "audio/x-m4b",
    "audio/x-aac",
    "audio/3gpp",
    "audio/basic",
    "audio/x-m4a",
    "audio/snd"
)