No considerations bar bitrate I'm afraid. I just went to SHOUTcast - Jazz - Bitrate and chose the stations at the top of the list. They'll do for now as background music when I'm using my computer, and if something jumps out at me I'll write down the artist's name for future reference. Whilst it's true to say I'm not expecting a 1Gb/s service anytime soon, do you think it's really the cost of bandwidth preventing vendors from streaming FLAC?

Thank gawd for that!

More audio tomfoolery
 

In article , John R Leddy
wrote:

John R Leddy;94210 Wrote:
There are no Adobe products on our computers so I'm currently unable
to use iPlayer.
'Jim Lesurf[_2_ Wrote: ;94214']get_iplayer doesn't require flash.
It can capture live or 'on demand'. And IIUC ffmpeg can now play the
live streams without it.
Thanks Jim, that's me up and running with get_iplayer. There's been no
need to look at FFmpeg so far.

OK.

BTW I'm assuming you *do* have ffmpeg (or avconv) installed. That's useful
because get_iplayer will then automagically call them to turn fetched flv
format files into mp4 or m4a. [1]

Note that as the BBC develop the 'Audio Factory' that now drives iplayer
serving the access processes will evolve. So we may find that this means
current versions of get_iplayer may not work at some future point. The
developers are working to keep up. But have to do so without any direct
help from the BBC for whom get_iplayer is "not supported or condoned".

So the first the developers of get_iplayer know about changes is when they
happen. Apart from that they have to guess what might be coming next. Makes
life 'interesting'... ;-

Jim

[1] For years now I've taken it for granted that anyone working on av files
will find ffmpeg/avconv essential as a tool. Ditto for sox when working
with audio files. Being able to use these makes life a lot easier if you
need to process the files.

--
Please use the address on the audiomisc page if you wish to email me.
Electronics http://www.st-and.ac.uk/~www_pa/Scot...o/electron.htm
Armstrong Audio http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/Armstrong/armstrong.html
Audio Misc http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/index.html

Thanks Roger.
foobar2000 shows a URL of http://stream.psychomed.gr and a file path of http://50.7.173.162:8014/ for Audiophile Stream Network's http://yp.shoutcast.com/sbin/tunein-....pls?id=160671 SHOUTcast directory link, so I'm there already and streaming fine.
I'm just plodding along with jazz at the moment, adding an artist to my music collection as and when I come across someone I like.
Time has me struggling to maintain my music collection, so adding various subgenres of jazz keeps me busy whilst just about allowing me the time to keep tagging my other files.

More audio tomfoolery
 

On Fri, 17 Jul 2015 23:45:46 -0700, Phil Allison wrote:

Johnny B Good wrote:

====snip====

The remaining issue with DACs was the analogue output stage clipping
that afflicted some of the earlier products due to inadequate voltage
rail provisioning derived from the "Join the dots" peak amplitude
calculations by some rather naive designers who didn't fully understand
the process of handling a bandwidth limited analogue signal encoded
into the digital domain.

** Not real sure what you are on about here, but the maximum signal
level possible from a CD player is 2Vrms or 2.83V peak. Given that most
players have dual 12 or 15 volt supplies for the op-amps, there is no
such issue.


The "Join the dots" approach to deciding the clipping headroom required
in the DAC stages of *some* models of CD players would normally have
sufficed with most music material. The trouble only really became evident
as a result of the "Loudness Wars" techniques where the digital
processing permitted 'soft limiting' to be taken to such an extreme as to
be just shy of 'clipping'.

It was the resulting steep leading transients on 'soft limited'
waveforms that caught out the marginally sufficient of clipping headroom
based DAC/ output buffer amp designs.

In fact this deficiency in some models of CD player only became evident
as a result of the research into the undesired effects of such dynamic
range compression being taken to extremes by the perpetrators of the
"Loudness War".

Unfortunately, I don't seem to have the article(s) in question
bookmarked to offer as a citation and googling "Loudness War" results in
more than enough hits to choke a Blue Whale to death on if each hit
represented just a single minnow's worth of protein.

--
Johnny B Good

More audio tomfoolery
 

In article:

Johnny B Good says...

Unfortunately, I don't seem to have the article(s) in question

Possibly not what you were thinking of, but an interesting article
about digital headroom.

http://benchmarkmedia.com/blogs/news...dio-goes-to-11


--
Ken O'Meara

List of UK hi-fi & audio dealers:
http://unsteadyken.esy.es/

Yes, my installation of get_iplayer v2.94 has the following sub directories:
AtomicParsley
FFmpeg [ffmpeg-2.2.3-win32-static]
LAME
lib
MPlayer
perl-licence
RTMPDump [rtmpdump-20140302-git-79459a2-win32]
VLC [vlc-2.1.5]

The SoX website appears to be down at the moment.
I'm trying to think of the things I've used Audacity for...
Deleting huge artistic silences between the visible and hidden last track of an album; and also cutting those types of tracks in two.
Reducing 24-bit 192kHz FLAC files to 24-bit 96kHz.
I've used the Amplify effect on speech files (old radio comedy), but bottled-out using it on music my files. Your thoughts concerning this would be most welcome.

Now I've opened this can of worms, here's a real-world issue which will probably never occur again.
I have a John Mayall "Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton" CD [EAN 0042284482721]
http://www.discogs.com/John-Mayall-W...release/448024
This CD contains both mono and stereo tracks which EAC has extracted to all being stereo.
I have separated the tracks into two directories:
John Mayall - 1966 - Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton (Mono), and
John Mayall - 1969 - Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton (Stereo)

I know you're aware I won't be held back by the minutiae, so whether all the tracks ultimately end up in one directory or two, those faux stereo tracks will be getting processed at some point. Before I drop them into Audacity [Tracks - Stereo Track to Mono], I would appreciate your best practice advice on what to do next.

More audio tomfoolery
 

On Sat, 18 Jul 2015 23:45:47 +0100, UnsteadyKen wrote:

In article:

Johnny B Good says...

Unfortunately, I don't seem to have the article(s) in question

Possibly not what you were thinking of, but an interesting article about
digital headroom.

http://benchmarkmedia.com/blogs/news...dio-goes-to-11

Thanks, Ken.

That's definitely related to the point raised in the loudness war
article about clipping being induced in some CD players by such
processing and is entirely relevant. I've bookmarked that article.

--
Johnny B Good

More audio tomfoolery
 

In article , Johnny B Good
wrote:
On Sat, 18 Jul 2015 23:45:47 +0100, UnsteadyKen wrote:

In article:

Johnny B Good says...

Unfortunately, I don't seem to have the article(s) in question

Possibly not what you were thinking of, but an interesting article
about digital headroom.

http://benchmarkmedia.com/blogs/news...dio-goes-to-11

Thanks, Ken.

That's definitely related to the point raised in the loudness war
article about clipping being induced in some CD players by such
processing and is entirely relevant. I've bookmarked that article.

You may also find these of interest

http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/HFN/Clipp.../clipping.html
http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/HFN/OverTheTop/OTT.html
http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/HFN/OTTre...d/results.html

There are some AES papers on this as well, but alas as yet their e-archive
isn't public. It should be sometime, and I can then start giving URLs for
various articles on topics. Roll on open source...

Jim

--
Please use the address on the audiomisc page if you wish to email me.
Electronics http://www.st-and.ac.uk/~www_pa/Scot...o/electron.htm
Armstrong Audio http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/Armstrong/armstrong.html
Audio Misc http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/index.html

More audio tomfoolery
 

In article , Johnny B Good
wrote:
On Fri, 17 Jul 2015 23:45:46 -0700, Phil Allison wrote:

Johnny B Good wrote:

====snip====

The remaining issue with DACs was the analogue output stage clipping
that afflicted some of the earlier products due to inadequate voltage
rail provisioning derived from the "Join the dots" peak amplitude
calculations by some rather naive designers who didn't fully
understand the process of handling a bandwidth limited analogue
signal encoded into the digital domain.

** Not real sure what you are on about here, but the maximum signal
level possible from a CD player is 2Vrms or 2.83V peak. Given that
most players have dual 12 or 15 volt supplies for the op-amps, there
is no such issue.


The "Join the dots" approach to deciding the clipping headroom required
in the DAC stages of *some* models of CD players would normally have
sufficed with most music material.

Not clear what you mean here. Do you mean "join the dots" to be linear
interpolation (a la Legato Link) or oversampling by more accurate means? If
so, what? Plain linear interpolation totally avoids having intersample
*values* that clip, but does so by distorting the data-defined waveform.


The trouble only really became evident as a result of the "Loudness
Wars" techniques where the digital processing permitted 'soft limiting'
to be taken to such an extreme as to be just shy of 'clipping'.

That has certainly been a dominating factor. But it is more complex than
that.

Its quite possible to have a series of samples which fully and correctly
defines an unclipped waveform *but* which - when correctly reconstructed -
has peaks *above* 0dBFS. And then some DACs duly clip or distort as a
consequence. In theory, the data and waveform are fine. But in practice the
DAC builder didn't allow for this.

For more detail see the URLs I gave in my previous posting in this thread.

Jim

--
Please use the address on the audiomisc page if you wish to email me.
Electronics http://www.st-and.ac.uk/~www_pa/Scot...o/electron.htm
Armstrong Audio http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/Armstrong/armstrong.html
Audio Misc http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/index.html