Peel on Demand

[ckitlee]

>  >Has anyone else noticed this drop in quality, and does anyone 
know what the
>  >actually quality is - no where can I find any indication of the 
sampling
>  >rate.  This question becomes less academic when Peel moves to the
>  >God-forsaken late night slot and I use this facility rather than 
stay up
>  >till the early hours.
>  >

The best that I can get is 44.1 kbps for the live stream. I can 
consistently achieve that bit rate until most recently. Yes, the 
quality has dropped recently. I wonder if that also has to do with 
the number of big sports events going on (such as Euro 2004 and the 
forthcoming Olympics) as I noticed in the past that quality from the 
BBC live streams dropped significantly in period of big international 
events.

> 
> The way to maximize the bitrate is to download the actual Real Audio
>   file and then play it on your own Real player.
> There are several progs you can use to do this.  My favourite is 
Net Transport
> from    http://www.xi-soft.com/default.htm     which you can use 
for free
> The BBC file names to enter into it are
> rtsp://rmv8.bbc.net.uk/radio1/peel_tue.ra
> rtsp://rmv8.bbc.net.uk/radio1/peel_wed.ra
> rtsp://rmv8.bbc.net.uk/radio1/peel_thu.ra
> 

On the other hand, the recorded stream is of a slightly lower 
quality, at 32 kbps. I don't think the Net Transport can record a 
live stream, but yes, it is a very handy tool.

CK