Help required to stream BBC Radio to Sonore Rendu, using Bubble UPnP controller

[DavidL]

(03-05-2015 21:45)simoncn Wrote:  

(03-05-2015 12:27)DavidL Wrote:  To answer your questions:
Playing a Linn Classical stream without transcoding worked fine on the Rendu.
I have saved the Debug log for playback without transcoding to the Rendu (file attached).

I looked at this log file and it appears the Rendu can't handle an AAC ADTS stream. Shortly after MinimServer starts streaming the audio data, the Rendu closes the connection.

Quote:The suggestion from Sonore to allow playback was to check the 'Use Proxy' box in the Nexus Settings / Local Media Server menu. This had no effect on the playback behaviour.

After much experimentation with transcoding in MinimServer / MinimStreamer I believe I have solved the problem.
As noted above with no transcoding or with transcoding *:wav or *:wav24, playback lasted about 2 seconds, however with transcoding "*:mp3" playback lasted for between 12 and 30 seconds.
I therefore tried transcoding with "*:mp3;320k" and playback worked fine for all the BBC stations. As specifying the output bitrate did the trick, I then tried transcoding set to "aac:mp3;320k" and this also gives perfect playback!
Food for thought?

I was reluctant to use this type of transcoding as while there will be no loss of sound quality between lossless formats I believe that re-coding / up-sampling lossy formats could have a negative effect. Any comments?

I agree that this will not produce the best sound quality.

Quote:I've compared the sound quality of the MinimServer streams with that from the same stations on DAB radio and Freeview TV - they are difficult to tell apart even though the bit rates of the latter are lower than 320.

This makes sense, given that you are transcoding one lossy format to another.

Thanks for the quick response and your explanations and comments.

As a matter of interest is there any way to set up transcoding from the AAC ADTS input stream to a non-compressed format? This might give better sound quality as there would be no re-compression of the audio. I've tried the transcodings "aac:wav24;48" and "aac:wav16;48" as I'm aware the BBC encoding uses 48kHz sampling but neither works.