I noticed when the music get softer near to the end of the track, the bit rate suddenly down to below 100kbps, sometimes a few kilobyte! I observed some classical tracks with a few seconds of silence, the bit rate suddenly down to very low. This looks like NOT a classic characteristics of FLAC encoding and decoding. This seems to be some kind of throttling in order to save some bandwidth. If this is so, does this qualified as a ‘lossless’ streaming?
From www.stereophile.com
My take on that would be … if the bitrate drops lower than this it’s most likely that the local cache is full and does not required further data at that time. I doubt then would compromise ‘lossless’ that would be PR disaster.
How are you viewing what the bit rate is?
How does that not look like FLAC? The key is that FLAC is a variable rate lossless codec. The bit rate continuously varies as high/low as needed for lossless. And some audio can be compressed losslessly at a bit rate of just 100 kbps.
AJ
Would like to know as well.
I thought that Tidal “streams” as a single song download that waits in memory to be played. I have watched the download using the Mac Activity Monitor Network Tab on both the Tidal app and Roon when I had streamus interruptus issues.
As of June '15, the Tidal app would download the next song during the last few seconds of the current song. Roon downloads the next song during the first few seconds of the current song - at least it did the last time I checked. Of course, if there’s nothing in the queue then the download starts as soon as the Tidal server can acknowledge the request.
But what gets me curious is finding an app that provides the actual bitrate of a stream in real time. Just as a way to verify what I’m hearing from internet radio, etc.
Maybe it was done through some type of Acoustic Spectrum Analyzer such as Spek or Spectro.
Now these would not work with streaming, so you would then have to rip the stream first and then analyze the audio file.
Just a thought
M.D.
I’ve Auralic Aries lighting DS app shown here. I’ve yet to check Roon, the bit rate is so aggressively throttled down when the music becomes softer especially coming to the end of track. I see most FLAC I ripped from my collections hover around 600+ Kbps to as high 1100kbps, even if levels get softer, it never fall below 600+ Kbps.
I’ve never see FLAC bit rate fall below the 600++ Kbps, the compression ratio to be effective is around 1.7:1 mathematically so how can bit rate fall so low?
That is effective bit rate. Instantaneous bit rate ranges much higher and lower than the average. Some frames will be ~100 kbps, others ~1100 kbps in order to arrive at an effective rate of 600 kbps.
AJ