MinimStreamer vs. TuneIn Radio on a Linn DS

[DavidHB]

All the fuss caused by the BBC's seemingly sudden and badly communicated decision to change over to .aac for its high quality feeds, leaving many listeners high and dry in the process, seems now to have died down. A lot of people have simoncn, and his programming and documentation on getting the combination of MinimServer and MinimStreamer transcoding to act as the interface between the new streams and user devices, to thank for the fact that the problem created for them by the BBC has now been solved. I hope that Simon has been properly thanked for this splendid effort.

Those of us who use Linn DS and DSM players were somewhat insulated from this furore. For those who do not know, Linn implements radio streaming on its players by requiring the user to open a TuneIn Radio (tunein.com) account. You then add radio stations to your TuneIn library, and specify your Tunein account name in the Linn configuration program (Konfig) page for your device. The Control Point (Kazoo, Kinsky or Bubble DS) then gives you a 'radio' page which displays your library of stations and lets you select the one to play. As far as I can see, this process bypasses the server completely; the player is in effect acting as both server and renderer.

The BBC change caught TuneIn (like everyone else, it seems) on the hop, and playing BBC stations on Linn devices was more than a little unpredictable (and the Linn forums correspondingly noisy) for a few days. But the dust settled fairly quickly and Linn owners soon had normal radio service restored. So it's only in the last few days that I have started to wonder whether the BBC high quality streams would actually sound better when played on my Akurate DSM via MinimStreamer rather than using the standard TuneIn arrangement.

The MinimServer User Guide has lots of good step-by-step instructions for new users on getting radio streams to work with particular devices. Existing MinimServer/MinimStreamer users have to cherry pick their way through this material to find the subset of instructions that is applicable to them. In my case this involved:

• getting FFMPEG installed on my NAS, which is a story in itself - see this thread;
• creating a test playlist (.m3u) file, using the Linn Classical station example helpfully provided in the MinimStreamer User Guide, saving it on the NAS with my other playlists, doing a MinimServer rescan and checking that the playlist and the stream were picked up in the CP and that the stream played correctly;
• checking that transcoding was working; fortunately, the Linn Classical stream is MP3, and I already had an MP3 transcoding entry in my stream.transcode property;
• adding the BBC stations to the playlist, by copying the contents of the sample file referred to in the User Guide into the existing Radio stations.m3u file, and checking that the result was formatted as described in the Guide;
• making provision for .aac transcoding, by adding 'aac:wav24' to the stream.transcode property.

The result of all this is the best radio sound I have ever enjoyed. On my system, transcoding gives the same kind of sound quality improvements to the radio streams as it does to FLAC files on the server; the transcoded WAV stream is noticeably clearer and easier to listen to than the .aac or.mp3 original.

The only fly in the ointment is that, to enjoy this better sound quality, I have to abandon the standard Linn/TuneIn arrangement, which is rather elegantly implemented in Bubble DS, and settle for the somewhat less elegant, though still quite practical, playlist approach. I cannot think of any way in which the TuneIn streams can be transcoded.

I'd be interested to know how other Linn owners using MinimServer/MinimStreamer have got on with transcoding radio streams. Unless I start to get dropouts, I think that transcoding will become the normal way I listen to classical music stations.

David