Hi Jonathan

Have you actually tried the Feb 26 version?  It seems fairly stable to me except for a bug with the SQR Crossfading plugin.  IceCast2 itself is only in alpha or beta but I've had it streaming internally successfully.

It's a shame to hear Shoutcast staying with proprietry formats.  I would have thought AAC royalty payments would be too high.  Perhaps they will be using WMA which is at least half the price.  There have been many RA/MP3PRO/AAC/WMA/OGG comparisons at differing bitrates and at 64kb/s or less, they are very similar.  The French broadcast at 24kb/s is really not too bad.

I find Ogg Vorbis at quality 0, 22khz mono produces a very nice sound at around 32kb/s.  Unfortunately, the OddCastDSP doesn't work through the SQRSoft crossfader at 22khz mono for some reason.  It crashes Winamp immediately.  I believe OddSock is working on it.

Regards,
Ross Levis
StationPlaylist.com


Jonathan Mosen wrote:

Hi Ross, a pity. Yes, as someone who makes a living from streaming media, I've done quite a bit of work with Oddcast and in my view it is way too flaky to rely on. Compared with the Shoutcast plug-in, which unfortunately doesn't do Vorbis, it's very buggy, temperamental in terms of which systems it will work with, has some problems associated with saving archives streams which is important for on demand listening, and this is all off the top of my head.

 

What you may also not be aware of is that Nullsoft appears to have found something better than Vorbis. While they are not saying so yet, I would put money on the fact that it is AAC, the audio codec in MPEG 4. Here is a quote from Tom Pepper of Nullsoft, posted yesterday.

 

 

We've considered heavily which direction seems most appropriate for the
second generation audio codec of SHOUTcast. Our primary goal in the
decision process was to provide smaller consumption of bits while
maintaining similar quality and compatibility with existing playback
systems. At the same time, the open nature of Ogg was very compelling,
and established the baseline of acceptance regarding cost of encoding
systems (free to the end user.) Also of significance was the extent
which other applications would be able to play back the audio,
including our most popular players (Winamp, iTunes, and RealPlayer,
respectively.)
In the end, Ogg didn't measure up as our best candidate. We still
think Ogg is a worthwhile codec, and as such SHOUTcast-streamable
support for it is available via NSV.
While I can't yet announce the precise codec we'll be using for the
next 3 year run, I will say it is making me very happy to see 56kbps
streams outperforming (from a purely subjective "quality" analysis)
current 128kbps streams, and the cost of the encoding seems manageable
enough for AOLTW to continue absorbing encoding and decoding costs, not
to mention the majority of playback devices and applications will be
supporting the codec as well by 2004, if not already.
 
End of Quote.
 
So unless there is a truly reliable Vorbis solution for Windows soon that works with Winamp, it's going to miss the boat.

        Jonathan Mosen
Director
ACB Radio, the voice of the Blind Community http://www.acbradio.org MSN Messenger or mailto:jonathan@... Work Phone: +64-6-348-8127
Mobile: +64-27-22Mosen, +64-27-2266-736
 

-----Original Message-----
From: Ross Levis [mailto:ross@...]
Sent: Friday, 4 April 2003 9:51 a.m.
To: LPFM_Radio@...
Subject: Re: [LPFM] Winamp v2.9

I didn't receive your message Jonathan, strange.  I don't think I'll start writing Winamp plugins.  Have you tried OddCast lately.  I few people seem to be using it now & I haven't heard of any problems.

Radio France has just started streaming in Ogg using OddCast.  I believe you will need to cut & paste these URL's into Winamp2 to listen.  They are only 24kb/s streams so not great quality.
France Inter : http://ogg.tv-radio.fr:1441/encoderfinter.ogg
France Info : http://ogg.tv-radio.fr:1441/encoderfinfo.ogg
France Culture : http://ogg.tv-radio.fr:1441/encoderfculture.ogg
France Musiques : http://ogg.tv-radio.fr:1441/encoderfmusiques.ogg
FIP : http://ogg.tv-radio.fr:1441/encoderfip.ogg
Le Mouv' : http://ogg.tv-radio.fr:1441/encoderlemouv.ogg
Hector : http://ogg.tv-radio.fr:1441/encoderhector.ogg
La CityRadio de Paris :
http://ogg.tv-radio.fr:1441/encodercityradio.ogg
Cheers,
Ross.

Dave Smith wrote:

Hi Jonathan..See my reply to Ross re streaming..Regards Dave

>From: "Jonathan Mosen" <jonathan@...>

>Good luck Ross, if you wrote a stable Windows-compatible OGG streaming
>plug-in the world would thank you, Oddcast is just too damn flaky.

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