Very newbie question: how do I tell if minimstreamer is runnng?

[simoncn]

Thanks for this clarification and sorry to hear about your outage caused by storm Ciaràn.

When you enter the stream URL directly into VLC, VLC is streaming AAC data from the internet, decoding this AAC data into LPCM and playing the LPCM to a DAC in the local device. In this "all in one" case, VLC can perform decoding computations with 32-bit precision and this is why you are seeing VLC displaying 32 bits per sample.

When you are using MinimStreamer to stream AAC data from the internet, transcode AAC to WAV and send the transcoded WAV data to a separate player device (renderer), the situation is different. If you are transcoding AAC to 16-bit WAV, the LPCM samples sent to the renderer will have 16-bit precision. When transcoding AAC to 24-bit WAV, the LPCM samples will have 24-bit precision and when transcoding to 32-bit WAV (if your renderer can handle this), the LPCM samples will have 32-bit precision. In this context, more precision is better.

From the above, it would seem that 32-bit local playback by VLC is the best option. However, this doesn't take into account the benefit you get from doing the streaming/decoding on a different device from the playing/rendering device. In my experience, this provides significant audible benefit because the electrical noise generated by streaming/decoding doesn't interfere (or interferes much less) with the playing to DAC part of the process.

Some would disagree about whether this separation makes any difference and I don't want to start a debate about this here. The relevant point for this discussion is that transcoding to WAV by MinimStreamer (if performed) should lose as little information as possible from the AAC data in the original stream.