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Low-bandwidth Net Radio
An anonymous reader writes "Slate has an article about Internet radio stations that use the aacPlus codec from XM satellite radio instead of MP3. Some of the ones they link to sound pretty good even at 24 kbps."
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SomaFM, an entirely listener-supported Internet radio site, has a few streams in aacPlus. I recommend them, they play stuff that you normally don't run across.
aacPlus is just a marketing name for the HE-AAC standard.
There are GPL'ed implementations of HE-AAC decoders, for example at http://www.audiocoding.com, so these streams should be playable on open source systems, too.
Btw. Some of technical details in the article (notably about parametric stereo) are *complete bollocks*. What they describe is Mide-Side stereo.
Parametric stereo transmits only a mono channel plus a very small amount of sideband information that describes how to reconstruct the stereo image (via decorrelation and fading).
Satellite radio is a broadcast medium, which means one signal is sent down to a large area, and anyone in that area can receive the same signal without quality loss as the number of listeners goes up.
It can be compared to any other radio broadcast; just because you're listening to 99.9 RIAA-0wn5-j00 FM doesn't mean other people have a weaker signal or diminished sound quality.
-Z
just because you're listening to 99.9 RIAA-0wn5-j00 FM doesn't mean other people have a weaker signal or diminished sound quality.
they wont have a diminished sound quality (for the most part, if its all on the edge of the range they might). but they most definately will always have a weaker signal in the immediate area. this is because your antenna itself distorts the field around it when it attracts the singal, and a small amount of energy is used in the reproduction of the sound wave when the receiver is receiving the signal. now typically this is such a low drop that you wont notice it but it is there.