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Radio 3 broadcasting in FLAC

Well, I clicked the 'Try' tab and am listening now to the live choral evensong broadcast (from Peterborough Cathedral I believe, where I sang as a chorister a long time ago...). It sounds very good, and right-clicking on the window shows a message saying 'lossless', but otherwise it's hard to know what quality the stream actually is. Is there any way of checking?
 
Well, I clicked the 'Try' tab and am listening now to the live choral evensong broadcast (from Peterborough Cathedral I believe, where I sang as a chorister a long time ago...). It sounds very good, and right-clicking on the window shows a message saying 'lossless', but otherwise it's hard to know what quality the stream actually is. Is there any way of checking?

Monitor the download rate or how much the total amount fetched varies with time. Is this noticable higher than when using the encapsulated 320k aac? Before I started using get-iplayer I found this a useful way to keep an eye on the rate being chosen.

I have no idea if the page is an April Fool or not. Could be genuine, or not. Could be a test on 'golden ears'. :) But would be a nice thing if it *does* mean flac streams. The BBC standardise on 48k/24bit and that's what gets delivered into the iplayer systems from the feeds.

I can ask someone at the BBC, but we'd probably know anyway before I heard back from them.
 
I have no idea if the page is an April Fool or not. Could be genuine, or not. Could be a test on 'golden ears'. :) But would be a nice thing if it *does* mean flac streams

The link was Tweeted earlier this afternoon by BBC Radio 3, so I don't think it's a April Fool.
 
I'm listening to it now, and it sounds very good. I've had to turn up the volume more than I normally would so either it's being broadcast at a lower level than the standard feed, or the dynamic range is more natural.

Looking forward to listening to the Proms later this year.
 
Happy to confirm that someone I know at the BBC has confirmed this is, indeed, a flac test. However IIUC it may only thus far be committed to a 4-week trial.

If I can I want to capture the stream *without* having it go though a browser or any possible OS mixers, etc. This is to avoid degrading or altering the results in any way. In the past I've been helped by the BBC to make some stream recordings which I can then compare, sample by sample, with what the input source version was that iplayer used. it would be useful to repeat that to check for any gremlins. Fingers crossed that I can sort something out in time!
 
Happy to confirm that someone I know at the BBC has confirmed this is, indeed, a flac test. However IIUC it may only thus far be committed to a 4-week trial.

The web page says that it's going to be available for 5 months (which rather conveniently takes us to the end of the Proms). However, that's not to say that your contact is correct and the website is wrong.

There's a short survey linked on the webpage. One of the questions is whether you'd like to see FLAC added as a permanent option. I answered yes.
 
Ignore that last post about volume, there's a volume control on the web page that wasn't at max <sigh>.

Did exactly the same yesterday as well! Have had it running continuously throughout the day since and am liking it. I did wonder whether as more people found it it would start to have issues but I guess that may be one of the reasons for the trial in the first place.
 
It seems now to be possible to fetch the R3 flac stream using a 'patched' version of the current ffmpeg. Some info on this on the uk.comp.os.linux newsgroup. Not yet sorted out for myself how to build the required version, though. Hope to asap. :)
 
I've now managed to make a copy of a version of ffmpeg which will fetch and record the R3 flac test stream. The process is fairly 'geeky' and involves 'patching' the recent sources. But details can be found in discussions on the uk.comp.os.linux newsgroup if anyone else wants to have a go.
 


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