> From: Najaf Ali Shah <email@hidden>
> Reply-To: email@hidden
> Subject: Re: streaming live radio setup -- caution
> To: email@hidden
>
> Hi,
> I would not recommend using AAC. The audio quality
> may be better but you want people to be able to access
> it first. I'm with the student radio station at Univ
> of Alabama at Birmingham
> (http://www.uab.edu/blazeradio). We use QTSS to serve
> up our shoutcast stream. Over the past 3-4 years of
> broadcasting, we've discovered that less than 5% of
> visitors use MacOS or have quicktime already
> installed. When we started broadcasting in RealAudio,
> we used to get calls everyday from people who were not
> able to play it. When we switched to Windows
> Media....the calls were gone. But now we stream MP3
> which almost every player plays without problems.
> Also, if you want to server up two streams for diff
> bitrates, you can also do that easily with the Icecast
> plugin.
>
I think it's too hard to make a blanket recommendation as to what
codecs to use for webcasting. For example, Ithaca College, which has a
70 million dollar communications school, one of the best in the
country, has two live radio stations and one live video station, all
streaming using Real Media, and seem to be happy with it. There is no
"best" codec that covers all situations.
One has to analyze who you are trying to reach, and how many concurrent
connections you can support, in addition to many other factors. In our
case, with only 50 concurrent clients that we can serve at this time
(due to bandwidth considerations), we can be choosy about who our
target audience is. We decided to go for the higher quality of AAC,
even though it meant that some of the listeners would have to download
and install QuickTime. This, incidentally is usually a relatively
painless process which only takes a few minutes on broadband or LAN.
QuickTime also coexists fine with RM and WM, for the most part. I often
demonstrate all three technologies playing video at the same time on a
PC. I realize there are a lot of "locked down" corporate computers that
may not have QT, so we decided not to target these. (A little aside:
one of our listeners in a large corporation was able to convince IT to
install QT on their computer)
On our web site we make it clear right from the start you need to
install QuickTime to hear our music, we give them a few tips on-line to
help them if it is not working correctly, and we make it easy for them
to contact us if they need additional support. We've had tens of
thousands of hits, only three outright complaints, and only about 5
people we had to step through successful problem-solving. But I also
realize and respect that other "streamer's" experiences may be
different, and everyone has to do their own OPEN-MINDED analysis of the
best solution for them.
Fraunhofer, one of the major developers of MP3 ten+ years ago, is also
one of the major developers of AAC, there is no question that this
codec is much more efficient than MP3, providing higher quality at the
same bit rates. So, we'd rather put our listeners through a little
extra trouble the first time they hear our station, to provide them
with a better listening experience after that. AAC is NOT an Apple
technology, it's part of the MPEG4 standard.
Real Media has gone to AAC for a lot of their latest audio codecs. AOL
has gone to Dolby AAC for its Radio@AOL and Radio@AOL for Broadband,
and is encoding over a million music files to this format. And the DVD
Forum has just selected AAC as the only lossy format for inclusion in
the DVD-ROM zone of DVD-Audio discs.
http://www.highfidelityreview.com/news/news.asp?newsnumber=13634395
Also, one should not mistake Mac market share for QuickTime market
share. Mac market share may be only 3-5% overall (although much higher
in certain areas, such as media creation and education), however,
QuickTime is a cross-platform technology, and its market share is a lot
higher. A few facts:
1. AOL, with 24 million members, is including the QuickTime installer
with AOL 9 for PC, and QT is now more tightly integrated with their
browser. According to their tech support, when you install AOL9,
QuickTime will automatically install (after asking) if it is not
already on the computer.
2. Apple claims QT 6 has been downloaded 175 million times in the past
18 months.
iPod and iTunes have also dramatically changed the audio coding
landscape in the past few months:
3. The iPod, which works with mp3 files, but is often used with AAC
files, is the most popular portable music player being sold, and has
25% of the market share. iPod works in conjunction with iTunes, which
requires QuickTime.
4. The iTunes Music Store is the most popular music download service,
uses only AAC, 50 million songs have been downloaded already, and 2.5
million AAC-encoded songs are being downloaded every week.
5. Pepsi is in the process of distributing 100 million free AAC encoded
songs through iTunes.
6. The deal with HP, to distribute their branded portable music player
based on the iPod, further validates AAC and QuickTime in the windows
world. HP will link directly to the iTunes Music Store from its web
site.
I think all the above indicate that QuickTime and AAC are NOT niche
players in the windows market any longer.
Incidentally, with QT Broadcaster, you can create many copies of the
application on the same computer, and each one can recognize the same
or a different USB audio input, and encode at a different rate, as long
as you have enough CPU power. So, you could stream three different bit
rates of live audio source A, two different bit rate streams of live
audio source B, and two different bit rate streams of live audio source
C, all in the same computer, which is also running apache and QTSS.
I would not recommend QT Broadcaster, AAC, and QTSS to everyone, or say
it's the best solution in all situations, I'm just stating why our
college went with it, and giving some reasons why it might be an
attractive solution for others..
For $1,000 a school can buy a 1 GHz eMac with 1 gig of ram, and get
started with live webcasting quickly and easily, serving hundreds of
concurrent streams (if they have the bandwidth) from several sources.
For an additional $250, you get OS 10.3 Server (10 client, with no
limitation on apache, QTB and QTSS) to make administration even easier
and have a more robust server. Again, I'm not pushing Macs as the only
solution. There are many individuals that can accomplish the same goals
with PCs running linux or windows, and I'm glad they do so, because it
makes this whole field more interesting and vibrant, and there is room
for all of us on this world!
Frank Fulchiero
Digital Media Specialist
Connecticut College
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