True audiophile radio web stream: 1411kb/s!

This is the highest quality internet radio stream I've yet come across from college station KEXP:

mms://media-wm.cac.washington.edu/KEXP-Uncompressed

It's broadcast at 1411kb/s so the same as CD! Plays fine here in VLC, and would sound superb through a high-end audio system.

I wonder if these audiophile streams will become more common in the future as bandwidth gets cheaper and broadband speeds increase? Or will the music industry step in and halt them? it's an easy way of copying CD-quality audio for free...

 

Seems like a waste of bandwidth considering they could stream lossless instead...

 

KEXP has been streaming 1441 for a couple years now...

 

Would be nice if I cared about what they were broadcasting.

 

Cool. Thanks for posting this.

 

Many thanks for the heads-up - having a real problem with buffering though.

Best Wishes
David

 

Hmmm, really? I don't think so offhand. Apple has not licensed Apple Lossless decoders to 3rd parties as far as I know, and had told me they did not intend to. On the Windows side, WMA Lossless exists but I don't know how prevalent.

So WAV makes sense in that everything should decode that.

Bandwidth-wise, I would think 256 or 320 mp3 would be fine considering this listening situation would very very rarely be pumped into a very fine system AND the listener listening critically. But it's probably easier to just dump out the WAV stream.

 

WMA Lossless presumably requires the Windows Media Audio plugin but it doesn't matter - it would simply prompt you to install it the first time you used it, just like any other browser plugin.

 

Great station. Maybe you caught in on a bad day?

 

no it's just not a Classical station

 

Had to jump through some hoops to get it to come through my Linux Squeezeboxserver.
Flac would have been nice, and more and more hardware is supporting it these days.

Cody

 

Plays fine using Real Player. I'm surprised a college station does this, considering how tight budgets are nowadays at most public post-secondary institutions. Maybe the bandwidth was donated or offered at a lower price (I'm not against doing these things, just wondering out loud). A listener-supported station here with excellent music choices only offers a 32kbps stream which sounds worse than AM.

 

KEXP is based in Seattle and Paul Allen is very generous in his gifts to that station. It actually used to have different call letters but they changed it when he donated tons of money so that the name of the station would be a tie-in to the Experience Music Project, which was his baby.

 

No it doesn't. Flac is an open source codec and a Czech classical music radio already use it, only about 700-800kbps.

http://amp1.cesnet.cz:8000/cro-d-dur.flac

 

The Clientele, Fleet Foxes - not bad so far.
Thanks!

 

wow.

very nice sound(from pc to receiver via RCA), no buffer problems, no saturations, no 'pops and clicks' in WMP 6.4.09.1129 (as i don't use this player i never update).

seems no sense but i never had heard radio in net: how to open the link in VLC?

thanks so much, very nice Nick_G!

 

Fleet Foxes? Great!

Really, though, one does get tired of constantly being forced to "download and install the plug-in" to listen to this or listen to that. It's like having to have separate televisions because channel "A" doesn't broadcast the same way that channel "B" does. I wish that somebody, somewhere, would establish a standard that everybody would adhere to. One stream, one player, and be DONE with it.

 

Wow, WMP 6.4? Pretty sure that's only the latest pre-installed version on Windows 98. Even 2000 has WMP 7 lol.

 

So is it WAV or WMA? My XM-Player says it's WMA.

And it doesn't show any title or artist info. Same with my VLC and Winamp. Pity, if I like something I would like to know what it is.

Anyway, thanks for the tip.

 

DragonQ,
my win2000 is newer (than me)

wolfram
VLC infos:
codec:araw
channels:stereo
44100
16b

cheers!

 

Yes, in WMP 11, it plays uninterruptedly too.

But sound signal spectra displayed on real time spectrum analyzer give different impressions: on most programs they are characteristic for uncompressed digital formats, on some programs, for compressed ones. This makes think that not all the “sources” they broadcast are uncompressed.

 

I've seen that too, but I don't know what araw is.

Well, as long as it works.

 

As long as they're running the stream through the same compressing/limiting signal chain that they send to the broadcast transmitter, this "lossless" business becomes moot, doesn't it?

 

If you have an iPhone/iPod Touch, it is easy: download the free application Shazam from Apple Store, start it and put the iPhone in front of a speaker for 10 seconds. It will report to you Song Title, Artist, Album Title and Album Art. This will work with any music you are hearing, anywhere.

 

WOW, They are airing (!) Nick Drake right now...