BBC R3 Lossless Stream

[JohnT]

I saw this thread a few days ago so decided to try and get it to work. I'm documenting my experience in case in might help others.
My setup is MinimServer/Streamer running on a Synology NAS, MinimWatch on Windows 10 and a Cambridge Audio SteamMagic 6 as the renderer. I use either the SM6 front panel or the Android Cambridge Connect app as the control point. The SM6 will play the BBC Shoutcast streams (until the BBC turn them off) but not the AudioFactory streams so I can't use that as the renderer.

I updated my MinimStreamer to version 0.7.1 and added the R3DASH url to my existing m3u file of HLS urls. As I couldn't play anything at this stage, I tried recording - by setting the stream.options value to R3DASH. I could see a file being written in the minimserver/appData/rec folder on the NAS with a file type of FLAC. This would play in VLC but wasn't recognised in my editing software. I'd come across this issue before when recording the HLS stream which is written as an aac file, i.e. raw audio not encapsulated in an m4a container. Likewise, the raw FLAC file doesn't contain any metadata but in both cases this is easily remedied with ffmpeg (I do this my Windows laptop as it's much quicker than on the NAS). E.g. ffmpeg -i R3DASH-20170818-193000.flac 'Mahler 2.xxx' - the xxx could be 'flac', 'wav' etc. I convert to wav, edit the file into 'tracks' (e.g. movements), convert back to flac and then use mp3tag to add the metadata for minim server. Finally, I copied the curated files to a new folder on my NAS, I was able to listen to the recording via my SM6. The sound was definitely an improvement on aac recordings.

So far so good. My next problem was to how to listen to the live stream. On the forum, there was a mention of the BubbleUPnP Android app (which I already had on my phone) and Google Chromecast Audio (which was in its box). I connected the optical SPDIF output of the CCA to the SM6 (to use it's DAC rather than the CCA’s DAC) and verified I could play music on the NAS from MinimServer (in the BubbleUPnP setup, I changed the 'renderer' from Stream Magic to Chromecast, leaving the 'library' at MinimServer). To play the live DASH stream, in the library view, I had to select 'Playlist' and then 'BBC Radio' to see the list of stations from the m3u file. Selecting the R3DASH entry started playing the live FLAC stream. As others have found, this was rock solid all during the day with sound audibly better than the live (Shoutcast) AAC stream I can get on the SM6. The HLS AAC streams in the playlist however wouldn't play, giving me an error message - media not supported by Chromecast. Further research suggested I needed BubbleUPnP Server to be installed - which I did on the NAS. After that, all the stations in the playlists worked.

Many thanks to all the forum contributors who posted help and suggestions and especially Simon for his brilliant work with the Minim software.