Forst5d ago

Looking at digital radio bitrate statistics (DAB), seems like Sweden has got it under control in comparison. In Australia, UK it's just sad. How is 24-32 kbps acceptable for music channels? I understand it's HE-AAC (unclear whether SBR or SBR+PS), but still. I have a suspicion this has become somewhat of a norm?

src: https://www.digitalbitrate.com
cc @james
#DAB #DigitalRadio

Show threadJames Cridland
@forst If the sound quality is bad, people will not listen. 32kbps is absolutely fine in the car though.
Apr 5 at 11:09pmWeb
Show threadForst4d ago
@james That's fair, thanks! Makes sense, as one is unlikely to listen to DAB elsewhere, and car noises mask the artefacts.
Show threadJames Cridland4d ago
@forst Fine in the kitchen or the shop with a little radio. Where you do notice the difference is in perfect conditions at home - and streaming is a viable alternative there
Show threadPaul Martin4d ago
@[email protected] @[email protected] A lot of them are mono.

Even in the car, the online stream of Boom Radio (128 kbps MP3 stereo or 64kbps AAC stereo, also 160kbps and 256kbps AAC) is preferable to its DAB+ version (32kbps AAC mono).

From the quirks on the stream I can tell they're using Liquidsoap as the encoder.
Show threadForst4d ago
@nowster Ooh, out of curiosity, anywhere one could read about the Liquidsoap (and perhaps other?) quirks?
Show threadPaul Martin4d ago
@[email protected] The most obvious is that Liquidsoap https://www.liquidsoap.info/ will show "Unknown" if you clear the "now playing" metadata variables.

I use it for reencoding a single high bitrate stream into multiple different encodings (AAC, MP3, Vorbis, HLS AAC), with silence and loss of feed detection, automatically inserting substitute audio (birdsong) until things return to normal.
Liquidsoap - Audio & Video Streaming Language

Swiss-army knife for multimedia streaming