World Service podcast bit rates

[RS]

>From: Budge Sent: Thursday, August 17, 2017 12:03

>Hi Richard,
>This is way OT so forgive top post but you mentioned players and I had some 
>problems with Linn devices a while back which was mentioned again recently 
>and has still not to my knowledge been fixed.

>My device of choice now is a Raspberry Pi with an IQaudIO DAC on top.
>Software is straight Raspbian with MPD player and with Jean-Francois 
>Dockes' brilliant upmpdcli front end to give me UPnP renderer with gapless 
>playback between tracks.  For completeness of system description the music 
>and GiP radio recordings are served by NAS running minimserver and control 
>point is BubbleUPnP on android phone.

>Very much more affordable than Linn and more to the point, not yet baulked 
>at playing anything I throw at it and it enables me to continue to use some 
>quite decent amplifiers that otherwise would be redundant.

Hi Alastair

Many thanks for the suggestion.  I'll certainly look at it.  I had a quick 
glance at IQaudIO, and it seems they have a range of boards.  The Pi-Digi+ 
will probably do what I need, although I may only need a HDMI to TOSlink 
converter as my amplifier will do the DA conversion.

Sorry to hear that Linn has not fixed your AAC problem.  At one stage it 
seemed quite promising when they identified the problem from the samples you 
sent them.

I received a lot of help on this listserver from someone with a username 
something like batguano999.  The problem he had sounded similar to mine.  He 
had found it was container dependent.  The length of file his player would 
play ranged from zero with AVconv to 40s for ffmpeg up to 30min for a file 
multiplexed with mp4creator.  I wasn't getting anywhere with AGPteK support 
so I decided to buy a SanDisk Clip Jam to see if that was any better.  I 
then came across a thread in a ffmpeg forum started by someone with a 
similar username.  He said there it was the SanDisk Clip Jam he was having a 
problem with!  He had been trying for a year or so to get the ffmpeg 
developers to fix whatever in the multiplexing was responsible for the 
problem.  Anyway I've been lucky because SanDisk issued new firmware which 
fixed the problem only about two months after I reported it.  It will now 
play all the AAC-LC files I have tried.

I still have a problem with the Triax satellite receiver, so I'll give the 
Raspberry Pi a try.

The irony is that the FAAD and FAAD2 decoders used by VLC and ffmpeg seem to 
work well.  I appreciate that developers may not want to include GPL 
licensed code in their products, but you would think they might get some 
inspiration as to how to make their decoders work from the free decoders.

Best wishes
Richard