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Fip Radio URLs - m3u8?

Dave H.

Revolutionary relativist
Kind of a computer issue, but it's in service of audio gear, so it seems appropriate to post here.

After seeing the station mentioned on Joe P's DAC thread, I'm trying to figure out what higher quality streams of Fip radio are available via my Pi/Volumio player.

I managed to graduate from the 128kbps mp3 stream (http://direct.fipradio.fr/live/fip-midfi.mp3) to the 192-ish kbps aac stream (http://direct.fipradio.fr/live/fip-hifi.aac). Which was nice.

There seems to be some kind of .m3u8 stream which might be higher quality still, judging by URLs posted on the Roon forum. But when I try adding that url (https://stream.radiofrance.fr/fip/fip.m3u8?id=radiofrance) as a station in Volumio, some kind of switch trips en route, and I get redirected to a 'lofi' stream at approx 30kbps.

So I tried searching Ecosia for 'Fip radio m3u8' to try to find out more. And instead of a site description, one of the results has this tantalising snippet of code:

stream.radiofrance.fr
https://stream.radiofrance.fr/fip/fip.m3u8
#EXTM3U #EXT-X-VERSION:3 #EXT-X-STREAM-INF:pROGRAM-ID=0,BANDWIDTH=78000,CODECS="mp4a.40.2" fip_lofi.m3u8 #EXT-X-STREAM-INF:pROGRAM-ID=0,BANDWIDTH=160000,CODECS="mp4a ...

(Edit - NB: the stupid emoticons are automatically replacing : and P in the text, I don't know how to stop the bloody things coming up!)

That code bit towards the bottom has me thinking. This is clearly some kind of 'If x then a, if y then b' simple code. It's incomplete, but it seems I'm getting redirected to a lofi stream because something, somewhere incorrectly thinks I have lower bandwidth and/or the wrong codecs.

So does anyone know how I can get to see the rest of that code? As I suspect that a line or two later there's something that says what the hifi stream url is.

Clicking the link just shows a browser-based player with no visible info. I tried putting fip_hifi.m3u8 at the end of the stream URL in Volumio and that didn't work. And I tried enabling Develop view in Safari (I'm on a Mac) and inspecting the page, but couldn't find anything that looked like the above code (though I may have just been looking in the wrong place).

So, any ideas? Or maybe does anyone know for a fact that the best stream available is the aac one, and that the m3u8 just redirects to that if bandwidth is deemed sufficient?
 
LMS has an execellento Plug in for radio France by Mr Webster

Home > Radio France > France Musique > La Jazz

France Musique La Jazz (HLS)
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France Musique La Jazz (AAC)
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France Musique La Jazz (MP3)
 
I just tried the HLS m3u8 stream for FIP in my VLC browser. It starts playing a 32 kb/s AAC stream but after a couple of seconds switches to a 192 kb/s AAC stream, so at best it's the same quality as the hifi AAC stream.
 
I just tried the HLS m3u8 stream for FIP in my VLC browser. It starts playing a 32 kb/s AAC stream but after a couple of seconds switches to a 192 kb/s AAC stream, so at best it's the same quality as the hifi AAC stream.

Ah excellent, that puts it to bed then, no higher quality to be had.

Thanks for checking.
 


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