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triode1

Listed below are comments made by triode1 between Tuesday, 16th September 2008 and Sunday, 15th February 2009.

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Better audio for BBC Radio online 6:23pm on 15 Feb 2009 @James

Will the listen again and live aac+ streams be available without the flash wrapper? If so can you share any info on accessing them or when this will be available.

(I see the mediaselector urls return multiple real entries for listen again to me - claiming 128kbit/s - I assume one of these may become aac?)
The latest on Coyopa, the Mayan God of thunderous noises 1:00pm on 28 Nov 2008 Interesting article in this month's Hi-Fi World magazine refering to the live stream bitrates and suggesting the BBC position is about definding DAB. Perhaps James can comment on this?

As iPlayer for TV has shown, I would suggest internet based streaming will become a dominant delivery mechanism for listen again and also live streaming (BBC1 and 2 are planned to live stream as well as the current BBC3, 4, News 24). As these use bit rates well the bit rates we are talking about for radio I would argue that the inability to reliably receive at higher bitrates is not a sustainable arguement. There may be a case for multiple rates to cover the different devices being streamed to though.

Those of us streaming audio round our houses and from other broadcasters already know that there is a significant quality differnce between 96 kbps, 128 kpbs and higher bit rates. As we discussed above the BBC internally see the need to use 768 kbps for their backhaul transmission. Codec does make a difference, but there's no magic codecs the less bits always means less information. Legacy codec such as mp3 are also improving - just look at hydrogen audio to show that mp3 codecs at 128k are still improving (helix is now beating lame).

So to me this is all about the amount the BBC is willing to invest in the transmission end and what their view is of the relative importance of internet base radio in comparison to other delivery mechanisms including DAB. Even if 96k is the decision today I would hope that the infrastructure is upgradable to 128k and beyond rapidly - bandwidth costs are going to continue to decline as is the cost of the server equipment for a given bandwidth. Locking into a specfic bandwidth now which is well below the point where most people can't tell the difference needs to be acknowledged as an ecconomical decision rather than one based on it meeting the necessary quality standard - which it clearly doesn't...
The latest on Coyopa, the Mayan God of thunderous noises 11:02pm on 12 Nov 2008 @digitalradiotech

Won't prolong the discussion here as its not a hifi board, but with the death of DAT, 48khz is really pro only so some high end audiophile dacs can designed to only work at cd frequencies. Some of the moders for Squeezeboxes disable the 48kHz crystal as they only improve the quality for cds for instance.
The latest on Coyopa, the Mayan God of thunderous noises 10:08pm on 12 Nov 2008 @RichardEvans67 - changing the sampling rate would reduce the number of devices which the stream is compatible with so I would not recommend it. PC hardware will support 44.1 and 48KHz (often resampling 44.1 to 48K), but hifi dacs and the like will be much more fussy and may only do 44.1. I realise this may not be the main target, but using a standard rate of 44.1 or 48 will ensure most compatibility.
The latest on Coyopa, the Mayan God of thunderous noises 6:25pm on 31 Oct 2008 I'll second the request for by genre and sub-genre feeds. They would be very useful.

Without them its still necessary to page scrape to get the richness of menus that iplayer itself has and that the old aod menus had.
The latest on Coyopa, the Mayan God of thunderous noises 10:24pm on 15 Oct 2008 @James C
Interesting - so the source material is uncompressed (and hopefully your music store for playing "records" is also uncompressed).

1.5M to the transmitters will be nothing in comparison to what TV will need, I'm sure you could get a free ride on the distribution network... 1.5M to people's homes is still a bit high through, but will be realisable rapidly.

I'm reminded of the evolution of PC based music - at the start everyone had to use lossy compression due to the size of hard disks, now lossless compression is very realistic for most people's music collections and so there's no compromise in quality from the source. We could easily see this happening for radio over the internet. The counter arguement is that people are happy purchasing music from itunes etc at low bit rates. Even so most people can hear the difference below ~224 kbits on reasonable equipment. The good news is that this bit rates are only 2-3 times what you are talking about so should be realisable in a couple of years...? (and hopefully Coyopa will be flexible enough to flex the bit rate up)
The latest on Coyopa, the Mayan God of thunderous noises 9:47pm on 14 Oct 2008 @James Cridland

728kbit streaming would be fine... that's quite close to flac rates for a cd. Streaming to a device like a Squeezebox at those rates would give a really good quality experience. I can see this coming in the next few years. (Its no more bandwidth than video streams today)

@RichardEvans67

You may want to try out one of the SqueezeCenter plugins which give you access to iplayer and related urls. Look at the 3rd party plugins forum on forums.slimdevices.com. (I won't post here as its not the purpose of this blog)
The latest on Coyopa, the Mayan God of thunderous noises 9:47pm on 08 Oct 2008 James, out of interest - what's the bitrate of the source streams? I presume you have an internal format for live streams and an archiving format? As access bitrates improve, the rate at which we can stream over the net will increase - how far away are we from the source material - is it CD quality or less than this? (How may years are we from flac streaming of radio3 at full bitrate? Only then can you turn off FM!)
Things to do with /programmes #431: iTunes! 1:45pm on 20 Sep 2008 Matthew - great hack - working well, though it does take a bit of time to start up and fetch all the stream data.

Given that this is the bbc supporting extracting the mp3 stream from flash and piping to another player, could we lobby for a native mp3 stream to be made available for all of these programmes?? This would make it far simpler to get the streams into a variety of media players and devices including itunes.
XML feeds for Listen Again content 9:57pm on 16 Sep 2008 Thanks for the feedback Alan. These feeds are definately appreciated especially as it now looks more of the programs are becomming available. (I still count 423 out of 2033 missing this evening, but the main national stations are looking much better.)

Would it be possible to set up a two way discussion forum for these feeds and related topics. Those of us developing community projects to consume your data really need to be able to ask ask questions about future additions and direction. I believe this would really help - especially to ensure the amount of effort the bbc is putting into exposing its data is to prove worthwhile - it would validate that the data you are making available is useful and help turn the future direction. You clearly have an email list for the radio manufactures related to these feeds, would it be possible to open this up to subscriptions from the community?

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