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."

Comments

Re:What about other codecs...

[tomstdenis]

Um... psychoacoustic modelling IIRC isn't part of the standard. The standard mandates things like bit format and DCT precision.

So if your MP3s sound like crap

- up the bitrate to something reasonable
- Get a good source to encode from
- change the encoder [lame -q 0 is great]

Tom

The Interesting Bit is in the Last Paragraph

[conJunk]

Reading the article, my first thought was "so what? So we can ultracompress audio so it sounds good at low bandwidth? What's the point?" Truth is, everyone (at least in the west and industrialized Asia) has or will get broadband, *especially* those who are interested in things like net radio.

Then you get to this bit:

It seems crazy until you try it, but Mostly Classical proves that aacPlus can sound great at 24 kpbs. At 48 kbps, it's almost as crisp as a CD. At 128 kbps, it can deliver 5.1 channel surround sound.

Using the compression to deliver multichannel surround sound is pretty cool. In 5, 10 years, we'll probably have a really flash standard for home audio, and it's nice to know that some folks are thinking ahead to make sure we'll be able to get it streaming on our DSL lines.

It's good to see

[Dorsai65]

that folks are (again) distinguishing between the quality needed for casual use (having background noise) and sit-and-listen-to-it quality (CD/live).

One of my peeves about broadcasting over the net is that so many people want perfect signal, regardless of what they're using the broadcast for. The added bandwidth needed for studio-quality everything just means ever fatter pipes are demanded, raising the cost/price of the whole infrastructure and adding to the net congestion.

Re:platform irony

[moonbender]

OK, so Winamp isn't installed by default, but is is becoming the player of choice for the IT cogniscenti in place of WMP.

Hm. First off, I wouldn't say that Winamp is becoming anything - it already is, and has been for a while. People, and not only "IT cogniscenti" (aka geeks), have been using Winamp in the days when WMP wasn't a generally known acronym. To me, Winamp was the player of the period when MP3 was still new (remember oth.net and AudioGalaxy?). I kind of doubt the number of users is still increasing, in fact I imagine that if anything, the number is decreasing.
I might be wrong, though - so, what is the choice among the geeks these days? Do you all still use Winamp? Personally, I've been using Foobar for a long time now, mostly because of it's small footprint, straightforward interface and out-of-the-box global hotkeys. Because I'm so happy with it, I really haven't even looked out for any other new players, so I'm curious as to whether I've missed anything. (And I don't mean iTunes for Windows.)