Agreed, there must be sound shaping going on here.
I particularly remember Go Home, Girl playing from Ry Cooder’s Bop Till You Drop and thinking, this sounds HUGE. It struck me so much that I played my local rip of the CD immediately afterwards and it didn’t have anything like the presence or scale of the radio version.
Definitely the best sound quality I have heard on Internet radio, but just a bit too much emphasis on country and soft rock in the mix for for me compared to RP.
Thanks for your input, still trying to understand it all. I’m currently using Asset for my local files and haven’t used Minimserver or Bubble Server for playback of my local files. Is there an advantage (sound quality?) to be had here? Bubble server makes my Tidal sound better so would it (or Minimserver) make my local files sound better too? I’ve spent a lot of time getting my meta data sorted for Asset and don’t have much of an appetite for revisiting this exercise so hopefully I wouldn’t need to do that.
I noticed when I’m streaming the RP FLAC and JBR2 FLAC stations the tag says PCM and now you’re referencing it. What does this stand for? I’m currently using FLAC:L16 for my transcode in minimstreamer so does that mean the radio streams all get processed 16 bit? I have a few hundred high res files in my local NAS so I don’t think I should use that setting if I’m using minimserver to server my local files.
Is there an advantage (sound quality?) to be had here? Bubble server makes my Tidal sound better so would it (or Minimserver) make my local files sound better too?
I doubt it. I have run Asset and Minim side-by-side on my NAS and on Raspberry Pi servers and can’t tell the difference between them. If you’re happy with Asset for local files then there’s no reason to change.
I’ve spent a lot of time getting my meta data sorted for Asset and don’t have much of an appetite for revisiting this exercise so hopefully I wouldn’t need to do that.
No need to edit any metadata to use Minim, Minim will scan your existing files and organise them according to the existing metadata. Organisation and browsing via Minim is more flexible and customisable than Asset, although Asset does a fine job.
I noticed when I’m streaming the RP FLAC and JBR2 FLAC stations the tag says PCM and now you’re referencing it. What does this stand for?
Pulse Code Modulation – this is the most common method used to digitally represent analog music. WAV files contain the raw PCM data along with other metadata.
I’m currently using FLAC:L16 for my transcode in minimstreamer so does that mean the radio streams all get processed 16 bit? I have a few hundred high res files in my local NAS so I don’t think I should use that setting if I’m using minimserver to server my local files.
Precisely, that’s what I said above. At the moment it’s not an issue as you are only using Minim for Internet radio streams. However, if you were to give Minim a spin for serving your local files, you would want to make the changes I outlined above to ensure that your high res files are not downsampled during transcoding.
With Minim installed and running there’s no reason you can’t give it a try serving your local files alongside Asset – just point MinimWatch at your library by setting the contentDir property on the Server tab in MinimWatch and then choose Rescan from the MinimWatch menu. If you want to try this make sure you change your transcode setup first as described above.
Just as a data point changing the m3u file to remove the ;flac within the brackets doesn’t work for me. It changes the text of the displayed label and none of them play. I even tried it with just the ; and it didn’t work. It needs the ;flac to function for me.
It definitely won’t work unless you also change your stream.transcode property to flac:wav, *:L16. If you had already done that then I don’t know what’s wrong. Perhaps it’s an issue specific to the SuperUniti. At this point all I can suggest is sticking with what you have working, otherwise best to take it up with the Minim developer.
Ok, I hadn’t changed that. It’s working for me with my current set up so it may be best to leave it as is.
Might not be your thing but another FLAC lossless station is Chill Out Zone, https://chillout.zone/
#EXTINF:-1,[ChillOutZone] Chill Out Zone FLAC
http://air.chillout.zone:8000/radio/chillout_plus
Cheers, I’ll check it out this evening.
I’ve also been trying out a bunch of streams from https://www.hionline.eu/streaming-url/
Thanks for the radio address Adrian.
Btw, how do we get the icons to show with the radio stations in the app?
I would like to know that too, as far as I can see, there is no way to search for a specific station in the Naim App, or is there? All I see is genre, highlighted stations etc. But no direct search, unless I am missing something.
I’m curious how the icons for the radio stations can be made to appear in the app, too.
I’ve got a couple of FLAC stations to work with my 272 by using minimserver, but they just show as folder icons in the app.
It’s in the MinimServer documentation here:
https://minimserver.com/ug-library.html
When displaying a playlist entry for a network stream, MinimServer looks for artwork using the following search order:
- A file named entryname .jpg or entryname .png (exact-case match only) in the same directory (folder) as the playlist, where entryname is the title of the playlist entry as specified by the #EXTINF description for the playlist entry (not including any stream ID prefix). See the [Illegal filename characters](https://minimserver.com/ug-library.html#Illegal filename characters) section for details of how to handle playlist entry names containing characters that can’t be used in a filename. For example, the playlist entry
#EXTINF:-1,[Naim] Naim Radio
http://37.130.228.60:8090/
could have artwork in the fileNaim Radio.jpgorNaim Radio.png.
RP has a ALAC Rock mix and Eclectic mix on the ios app so I tried adjusting the urls from the main mix FLAC and it works. Seems FLAC but I haven’t confirmed play history.
Both of these urls work:
http://stream.radioparadise.com/rock-flac
http://icy-9.radioparadise.com/rock-flac
Haven’t tried the eclectic yet but wanted to share.
Here’s the Eclectic Mix.
http://stream.radioparadise.com/eclectic-flac
It’s nice to have this many choices for FLAC streams.
Can anyone explain how JBR2 is able to stream these 96k streams? If CDs are limited to 44.1k how do they get these higher rates?
This sounds so good.
Screen Shot 2019-09-15 at 4.13.50 PMEmail them and ask! They were very responsive when I asked the name of a track that had been played a couple of days earlier.
I suspect they are upsampling the stream, adding in some sound shaping (bass, treble, etc), and apparently are doing a good job at it. I have not asked, maybe you can contact them.
