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Low-bandwidth Net Radio

Posted by michael on from the bit-conservation dept.

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."

2 of 143 comments (clear)

  1. SomaFM by HoneyBunchesOfGoats · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. aacPlus == HE-AAC by Skuto · · Score: 4, Informative

    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).