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Record from Wiim? BBC Radio 3 Night Tracks
- Thread starter ssashton
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I'm pretty sure that the Radio 3 streams on BBC Sounds are up to 320 kbps AAC-LC via HLS. Which is good enough for me.
I remember they did trials of full CD quality about ten years ago, which I took part in. I imagined that it sounded better at the time, but it probably didn't. Never heard any more about it.
edit: I asked GPT-5 about the trials and it said I was thinking of when they introduced 320 kbps for the 2009 Proms. I'm sure they said CD quality - but maybe they meant 320 was as good as CD?
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All 320kbps mp3's, as far as I can tell.
Get_iplayer tells me that in terminal on my Linux laptop, and here's some recent examples transferred to my DAP to confirm.
Apologies, I can't seem to get them in the right orientation here, so you'll have to tilt your head, lol.
Yes, they are indeed up to 320 kbps. I'm not sure if streams from other BBC stations are lower. The highest quality is always set for BBC Radio 3, but I don't think there's any lossless streams now.
- Thread Starter
- #25
Thanks for the answers about the streams, but I had actually meant the centralised music storage system they use at the radio station. AFAIK radio stations have use computer based storage for many years and I wonder if tracks stored in the past, say, 15 years ago were not saved in lossy formats given space limitations back then and the huge catalogues they must have. Or maybe these days they just use Spotify, haha.
Tbf, commercial radio stations have never needed to worry about storage space, surely, given the size of their playlists
On the flip side, they don't need to worry about lossless files and dynamic range either, so it's a win/ win for them!
Maybe we have a BBC sound engineer member who can help?
I'd imagine that the music which the BBC record is saved as WAV files or similar? Do they save the many inputs that go to the mixing desk? Maybe those as well?
I used to use WAV files quite a bit 15 years ago - and the BBC can probably afford more disk storage than I can.
They certainly used to re-use video tapes some decades back - which is why some Doctor Who episodes are still missing I believe.
somebodyelse
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This was the announcement for the start of lossless streaming back in 2017:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2017-04-radio-3-high-quality-flac-dash
It looks like they don't do that any more:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/help/questions/about-bbc-sounds-and-our-policies/codecs-bitrates/
The story I heard was that they did the testing, found nobody could hear the difference, between FLAC (averaging 550kbps) and AAC at 320kbps so decided to drop FLAC to save money on network bandwidth charges. That makes perfect sense if you're trying not to waste scarce resources. Another story was that for digitising at least one variety of analog tape they bought up the entire remaining stock of heads for the tape machines, but that the rate the heads wear there weren't enough left to play all the tapes they had. I never heard whether they found a solution to that one, and I can't provide a source for either.
There are many more articles covering what they're doing on the technology side, so you can probably find out exactly what format(s) they're archiving in.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2017-04-radio-3-high-quality-flac-dash
It looks like they don't do that any more:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/help/questions/about-bbc-sounds-and-our-policies/codecs-bitrates/
The story I heard was that they did the testing, found nobody could hear the difference, between FLAC (averaging 550kbps) and AAC at 320kbps so decided to drop FLAC to save money on network bandwidth charges. That makes perfect sense if you're trying not to waste scarce resources. Another story was that for digitising at least one variety of analog tape they bought up the entire remaining stock of heads for the tape machines, but that the rate the heads wear there weren't enough left to play all the tapes they had. I never heard whether they found a solution to that one, and I can't provide a source for either.
There are many more articles covering what they're doing on the technology side, so you can probably find out exactly what format(s) they're archiving in.
Many thanks for digging up that first article. I had started to wonder if my memory was telling me lies about those trials. I remember reading that article when it first came out.
I'm pretty sure I couldn't really tell the difference between the FLAC streams and 320 AAC.
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