Dan Joy wrote on 31
st Aug, 2008 at 12:11am:
ProgMaster wrote on 30
th Aug, 2008 at 11:33pm:
Indeed, the sound quality of the music broadcast should be (at the very minimum) as good as a regular MP3 file of the same bit-rate played on your own PC. Hopefully, it should sound better than this - considerably better, as at the 'Engine Room' of S.A. is the industry standard
SAM
Media Server software. The music that is broadcast is passed through an extremely advanced AGC Gateway (which is part of
SAM), amongst other filters such as an EQ - this processes each and every track played. The end result being that it shouldn't either blow your speaker system up nor be too quiet. Also, the music (hopefully) shouldn't sound 'over processed', either.
Since the upgrade to
SAM version 4.3.6, the MP3 encoder is now of an even better quality than before and of course, if you're tuning-in to the AAC+ 32 kbps stream, this will sound a lot better than the old MP3 32 kbps stream. This is totally due to the format change - AAC+ being of a far better audio quality than MP3, especially at low bit rates.
I'm using the 128 kbps Broadband Stream. Generally this is sounding noticeably better (without, as you mentioned, sounding excessively processed) than playing the commercially-released CDs of the same tracks from an external disc drive through the same computer using the same speakers and the same software, usually Windows Media Player, that I use to get the stream. Sometimes I'll tweak the equalizer provided by Windows Media Player for my CDs, but I'll generally leave it flat, although on, for your stream.
What you are telling me amazes me -- you're actually converting these tracks to MP3 (if I've got that right) and it sounds better than the original CDs do with the same computer, same software (here on my end), and same speakers.
I'm flabergasted by that! MP3s BETTER than the original CD audio? Have I got something wrong here?
Indeed, you're pretty much correct here, Dan.
The albums and tracks which are on the S.A. database have been converted from the original CD into MP3 format. I use the excellent
Nero
software suite to convert CDs to MP3. They are converted to MP3 at a minimum bitrate of 192 kbps. These then make up the source files that
SAM uses and as mentioned above, are passed through a number of different settings before being streamed, with the AGC Gateway being the most important.
The end result being that the audio should be of an excellent quality - bearing in mind that
SAM isn't exactly cheap ... but certainly worth it if you're running an Internet Radio Station.
In an ideal world, the source files on the database would be in a lossless format - PCM or WAV - but this is purely due to storage constraints. As an idea, the current database stands at around 200 GB of data in MP3 format, I won't even become to speculate as to how large it would be if the files were in a lossless format. Only to say that it would be very, very large indeed !!
All of the above (and much more information) will be made available in the FAQ which is around 75 % complete at the time of writing this post.
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