Streaming Radio [Delivered Roon 1.2]

Forgive me if this has been asked already re Internet Radio: Will the Roon Signal Chain report the bitrate of the incoming stream?

The new HLS AAC BBC live streams are working :+1:.

1 Like

Oh, really! Thatā€™s highly advanced.

It currently doesnā€™t. Maybe @brian can be persuaded?

Itā€™s something Iā€™ve looked for in a web audio measurement tool and canā€™t find anywhere: a way to measure the bitrate of the stream that Iā€™m listening to.

maybe your asking for something more complicated, but for example, I listen to internet radio streams at work via foobar2000 on my windows computer. foobar2000 tells me the codec (mp3, aac, ogg, etc.) & the bitrate of the stream Iā€™m listening too. If VBR it even shows the changing rate as the song plays.

Thatā€™s exactly what I meant. Not a Foobar user but good to know.

When I stream from Soundcloud, NPR Music, etc. I am curious about the compression of the audio, especially f I want to record it bitperfert.

This is perhaps a bit too generic, but as an internet radio noob Iā€™m a bit confused over how to determine whats the best quality stream, which sounds like its going to be important if weā€™re typing URLs in directly.

From what I can gather, it depends on both codec and bitrate, and there are several variants (or more than several). So maybe a 64AAC will sound better than a 128mp3? Or not? Does anyone have a simple chart that could be posted as a guide?

I can see why Roon are going down this URL road - to give users a feature sooner than would otherwise be possible - but I have to say (and I hope Iā€™m not speaking out of turn here) even before itā€™s released I get the impression its not really going to be ā€˜in lineā€™ with the ā€˜Roonā€™ way of doing things - which is to take the user way from this sort of stuff and present music in a slick, UI and metadata rich interfaceā€¦.

Like so much else in Roon, user feedback is going to count for a lot, so give it a try and if itā€™s not up to scratch, let them know how to improve it.

Obviously radio streams donā€™t contain the metadata Roon can access through Tidal, so we shouldnā€™t be expecting the same integration with music streamed by Internet Radio.

Of course Iā€™ve not seen it yet, but from what Iā€™ve read in this topic it just seems like the usual Roon standards havenā€™t quite been applied to internet radio. I guess I just imagined Roon would take internet radio - as provided by the likes of TuneIn etc - and make it ā€˜betterā€™ or more ā€˜Roonlikeā€™, doing something quite unique with it, rather than sharing streaming links on this forum for example.

As one example, when other streaming services have been discussed in the past, the Roon guys have been pretty adamant that unless they can get full cooperation from a provider that would enable a solution theyā€™re completely happy with - at least being as good or better than, say, their Tidal integration - then its a no go. Perhaps its just been deemed that thereā€™s no point holding back for a fully-fledged internet radio as its not a big enough feature or whatever, so was just curious as to whether this more relaxed stance could be taken in other areas - i.e. if thereā€™s demand for features/services that wouldnā€™t provide the ā€˜fullā€™ Roon experience in the first version, we could at least have it in that state, rather than not at all.

Again, Iā€™m not knocking the idea of having a feature sooner if thereā€™s a demand for it - and it sounds like this approach to radio will keep many users happy (and is perhaps all anyone wants) - but it just seemed (to me anyway) like a bit of a departure from ā€˜the company lineā€™ so to speak.

Still, Iā€™m looking forward to v1.2 for so many reasons other than internet radioā€¦

I donā€™t think youā€™ll be disappointed with the Internet Radio implementation, but itā€™s a fundamentally different beast from a music streaming service. Roon canā€™t create bit rates or metadata where it doesnā€™t exist. A lot of folks have been asking for Internet Radio and itā€™s about to arrive, but itā€™s Internet Radio, not a metadata rich hi-fi stream of the same music Internet Radio happens to be playing. Maybe the latter will be possible one day, but not in 1.2.

1 Like

Most internet radio stations broadcast the artist-track metadata though. Is there any reason that couldnā€™t (optionally) feed into oneā€™s history and be clickable?

Iā€™m sure that there are loads of reasons! Less flippantly, I think it would be possible, but the scope for ambiguity is probably quite large. FYI, currently there is no metadata for the BBC HLS streams.

No thatā€™s right the BBC are currently ā€œdoing their thingā€, which is a bit odd because they do broadcast the information on DAB.

In all honesty thereā€™s a lot more pressing stuff to work on than putting lipstick on the pig that is internet radioā€¦itā€™s got nothing to do with hifi and cannot currently be enriched the way a tidal stream or your own collection is. That said, Iā€™m sure the interface will be good, albeit lacking metadata.

I donā€™t think you could more more Rong.

Internet radio is a priceless form of music discovery, and I Scrobble it today to capture artist-track info to later delve into in further detail. It seems like a natural extension of Roonā€™s capabilities.

2 Likes

Yeah, I kinda agree. But I still get antsy whenever I have to leave Roon to listen to something. Roonā€™s streaming Radio feature will keep me in the app. I listen a lot at my desktop and between the browser tabs, Tidal, and Roon thereā€™s a lot of stuff running. So when the phone rings, itā€™s a semi-panic to find, pause and not merely muteā€¦

Agree itā€™s great for music discovery, but itā€™s not hifi. Addressing things like metadata editing is imho much higher on the priority list than doing more than enabling addition of Internet radio streams.

Metadata editing isnā€™t hifi either!

Finding a track listened to via Internet Radio and playing the album through Tidal most certainly is hifi.

TouchĆ© ā€¦ however, it goes to the heart of being able to explore a music collection in ways not previously possible. Metadata and how itā€™s brought together sits at the center of Roonā€™s value proposition.