Fw: What modes should I use to get the highest quality recordingon radio

[James Cook]

On Mon, 16 May 2011 12:34:31 +0100, you wrote:

Hallo CW,

Thanks for your in-depth reply, 

For some reason I thought the mp3 would have been better. 

This was the case for me because in the old days I had to convert aac
to mp3 to get it to play on ipods ( I only discovered the mp3 feeds in
jan/feb 2011).
Now I use the aac to mp4 conversion we got from shevek - no more
transcoding on my side. Hooray!

So use:
> modes flashaacstd,flashaaclow,flashaudio,realaudio,wma
in an options file
or
> perl --type=radio "Classic Serial" --get --modes=flashacchigh,flashaacstd,flashacclow,flashaudio,realaudio,wma
on the command line.

> perl --type=radio "Classic Serial" --get --modes=flashacc,flashaudio,realaudio,wma
probably does the same thing - highest quality first.

For most shows I use flashacclow - for music flashaccstd.

JC

____________________


>
>Here's what I posted (on the 23rd of Feb, 2011). Listening to the audio
>back-to-back will show just how inferior the MP3 versions are to the AACs...
>
>> To show you what I mean about the MP3 vs AAC quality 
>> difference, here's a quick quality comparison (randomly chose 
>> an episode of The Archers, from Radio 4 the other day). The 
>> first time is the MP3 encode, the second is the AAC encode 
>> (served by default through the Flash player):
>> 
>> http://bit.ly/bbciprtest1al (~3.8MB)
>> 
>> Even on average speakers you should be able to hear a 
>> difference - the MP3 is "rumblier", warbly and speech is 
>> distinctly less clear with noticeable distortion under the 
>> main frequency of the speaker's voice. If you use headphones 
>> or good monitors you should be able to clearly hear the 
>> inferior quality of the MP3 version.
>> 
>> Comparing the two clips spectrally also shows a visible 
>> difference, there's less 'cohesion' in the MP3 clip, what 
>> appears to be double-encoded noise and the frequency ranges 
>> containing the speech energy are less distinct.
>> 
>> Neither speech nor musical content comes off well in the MP3 
>> versions - either the iPlayer's using an *AWFUL* MP3 codec 
>> (because both the AAC and MP3 files are 128kbps) or the MP3 
>> version is being transcoded from the original AAC source, 
>> which would explain a lot.
>