Soon be time to sweep the floor

So, 4 days to go…  can’t wait, so looking forward to actually hearing this thing!

For those of you who haven’t yet noticed, we’ve got test audio up on Sky channel 0202 right now.  A minor hiccup with the EPG data on Monday morning – that’s what you get when you get a channel from another radio station that’s relaunching that day.

For the curious, the plan with DAB is that the audio will switch over on the North West, West Midlands & London DAB services during the day on Monday although you will find the station identification doesn’t change.  Glasgow and Wales & West will switch at 7pm along with the name change on all multiplexes.

Online stuff – we’re not averse to providing a higher bitrate AAC or AAC+ stream.  I may put one up tomorrow or on Friday as a test to sound out opinion.  I have to say, although it is FM radio and is further compromised by an APT-X codec link and MPEG satellite downlink, we currently supply our TLRC network late night programme from York using AAC encoding at just 80kbps – and increasing that to 128kbps didn’t produce any noticeable benefit on tests.  Granted we are doing the online stream with AAC+ rather than AAC and there are other variables involved – but I can’t hear a 128kbps stream sounding *twice* as good as 64kbps.  And there is only a fairly vocal minority shouting loudly at present…

But – just to clear up the argument – we’re not worried about the cost of the bandwidth (to us) or the server loads, or the link loads or anything – I’m under no financial restriction on providing this service.  However, salient points have been made by others regarding the cost to the end user.  A 64k stream will work more effectively on a 3G mobile than 128k for example.  Further, there are probably more broadband users than we think that have capped download packages.  Therefore, if we’re to provide 128k, we will continue to provide lower bandwidth options to allow as many people as possible to enjoy the service.  A 32k AAC+ service for dialup users may still appear!

I should say the health warnings on the stream “uptime” remain in place until Monday – it might well come up and down a bit in the next day or so as we get things like backups in place and check power management & backup routing options.

Hope you’re enjoying the tests.  There’s a particular section with Miles Davis, Anita Baker and Bill Withers tracks in close proximity that I’m not yet tired of hearing…

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Published:
October 2, 2008 / 12:54 am
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Jazz FM technology
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