Vorbis - Jul 2003 - Virgin Radio now on ices2 - yp not working though

This afternoon I've transferred our Ogg Vorbis Icecast2 streams from darkice
to the ices2 encoder. Apologies if you were trying to listen; I had to stop
and start the streams a few times. They should be stable now as I'm off down
the pub now! As a reminder, the URL for the streams is at
http://www.virginradio.co.uk/thestation/listen/ogg.html.

Ices2 takes slightly different parameters to the darkice encoder, so I'd be
grateful for any feedback on whether the streams sound better or worse. The
main change I've made is that our lower bandwidth '32kbps' stream is
now
broadcasting in mono, which should sound nicer than 32kbps stereo.

Also, does anyone know if I should be able to get our streams to appear in
the YP directories? http://www.oddsock.org/icecast2yp/test/FAQ suggests that
I can't, but then some of the messages in the list archive imply that it
should work. Anyone have this working?

For the more technical among you, these are the audio bits from our ices
configuration file. Any suggestions on tweaks would be gratefully received:

For vr96.ogg:

<encode>
        <quality>2</quality>
        <minimum-bitrate>88000</minimum-bitrate>
        <maximum-bitrate>96000</maximum-bitrate>
        <samplerate>44100</samplerate>
        <channels>2</channels>
</encode>
<downmix>0</downmix>
<resample>
        <in-rate>44100</in-rate>
        <out-rate>44100</out-rate>
</resample>

For vr32.ogg:

<encode>
        <quality>0</quality>
        <minimum-bitrate>28000</minimum-bitrate>
        <maximum-bitrate>32000</maximum-bitrate>
        <samplerate>22050</samplerate>
        <channels>1</channels>
</encode>
<downmix>1</downmix>
<resample>
        <in-rate>44100</in-rate>
        <out-rate>22050</out-rate>
</resample>

Thanks

David

David Jones
Head of IT, Virgin Radio
t +44 20 7432 3346 f +44 20 7432 3456
www.smg.plc.uk * www.virginradio.co.uk
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On Tuesday, July 1, 2003, at 06:27 pm, David Jones wrote:
> For the more technical among you, these are the audio bits from our 
> ices
> configuration file. Any suggestions on tweaks would be gratefully 
> received:
I would only set the max bitrate on the 32kbps stream, and otherwise 
just rely on the quality setting. That should give a minor improvement, 
and the rate won't actually fluctuate all that much.

(not an expert opinion)

  -r

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On Tue, Jul 01, 2003 at 06:27:07PM +0100, David Jones
wrote:
> This afternoon I've transferred our Ogg Vorbis Icecast2 streams from
darkice
> to the ices2 encoder. Apologies if you were trying to listen; I had to stop
> and start the streams a few times. They should be stable now as I'm off
down
> the pub now! As a reminder, the URL for the streams is at
> http://www.virginradio.co.uk/thestation/listen/ogg.html.
You're getting problems on the q2 stream with sibilants from the
presenter (the "Jezza" programme). They are dispersed in the stereo
image. It's probably the known Vorbis HF problem, combined with your
multiband processing.


-- 
Paul Martin <pm@zetnet.net> (work)
  <pm@nowster.zetnet.co.uk> (home)
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> <encode>
> 	<quality>2</quality>
> 	<minimum-bitrate>88000</minimum-bitrate>
> 	<maximum-bitrate>96000</maximum-bitrate>
I'd skip these two, and just let the quality setting do what it's meant
to.
You may have decided this was neccesary, though. Perhaps experiment a bit?

<p>> <encode>
> 	<quality>0</quality>
> 	<minimum-bitrate>28000</minimum-bitrate>
> 	<maximum-bitrate>32000</maximum-bitrate>
It makes more sense here, since this is presumably aimed at modem users, and 
thus fixing the bitrate fairly tightly is a good idea. Perhaps use 
nominal-bitrate rather than quality, though, as I suspect the min/max 
settings here don't correspond well with the nominal bitrate given by
quality
0. If you're using min and max as well, using nominal bitrate rather than 
quality doesn't make any additional different - the quality is just mapped
to
a nominal bitrate internally.

<p>Mike

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> > <encode>
> > 	<quality>2</quality>
> > 	<minimum-bitrate>88000</minimum-bitrate>
> > 	<maximum-bitrate>96000</maximum-bitrate>
> 
> I'd skip these two, and just let the quality setting do what 
> it's meant to. 
> You may have decided this was neccesary, though. Perhaps 
> experiment a bit?
On the advice of quite a few people I've changed these now to exclude the
minimum bitrate. I'm keeping the maximum bitrate setting on both the high
and low bandwidth streams, however, as I do want to cap how high the
bandwidth of these streams go. Trust me, if the stream is described as
96kbps on our website, it will confuse users if it goes higher. It also
costs us more in bandwidth charges!

David

David Jones
Head of IT, Virgin Radio
t +44 20 7432 3346 f +44 20 7432 3456
www.smg.plc.uk * www.virginradio.co.uk
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