ARLA/CLUSTER: Britânicos perguntam, para ouvir a BBC preciso de comprar um novo radio com Internet.?

[João Costa > CT1FBF]

Do I need to buy a new internet radio to listen to BBC Radio?

Several readers found their internet radios stopped playing BBC
stations last month. Jack Schofield explains the problem.

...Where we live we have very poor medium wave and FM radio reception,
and the DAB signal is hopeless, so we bought a DTech internet radio to
listen via online streaming. Sadly, the BBC has dropped support for
the formats our device uses (WMA and AAC), and other internet radios
seem to be in a similar situation. Help! Which internet radios still
receive BBC radio under the new arrangements? Steve .....

...I live in the Philippines and rely on BBC Radio to keep in touch,
but my favourite stations are no longer available as they have changed
some stuff. I still get Radio Scotland on my Samsung GT-S5360 phone.
What do I need to do to receive the new BBC Radio? John .....

Last month, the BBC introduced Audio Factory, a new system for
streaming its radio stations over the internet. The change silenced a
lot of internet radios and hi-fi streamers. Worse, a lot of internet
radio manufacturers were caught out as well. These included big names
such as Sonos, Linn, Naim, Cambridge, Roberts and Logitech, including
Squeezebox.

The debacle prompted angry complaints and a grovelling apology from
Jim Simmons, the BBC senior product manager who had posted the Audio
Factory update. This didn’t solve anybody’s problems, however.

The gist of the story is that the BBC junked its patchwork WMA/AAC
infrastructure and moved to a new system based on “HLS and HDS using
the AAC codec”. Further, Simmonds said that “by the summer we hope to
have these streams available in the non-proprietary DASH format”.

The BBC also provided MP3 streams via Shoutcast as a fallback for
devices that can’t handle the new formats. This is a temporary
measure.

Many Radio 3 listeners complained when their 320kbps AAC audio stream
was replaced by a lower-quality 128kbps MP3 stream. In response, the
BBC seems to have backtracked and restored its high quality Radio 3
streaming in AAC. The rest have gone.

The BBC chose MP3 because almost every device supports it. It should
work with most of the internet radios that used the discontinued WMA
and AAC streams. But if you can’t get them from your usual source, you
will have to figure out how to change the settings to get them from
Shoutcast, if possible. That includes Steve’s DMTech Starry7 internet
radio – which does support MP3 – and whatever John is using in the
Philippines. For Android users, the XiiaLive internet radio app may
help.

Although MP3 isn’t very good for online streaming, the UK’s antique
DAB digital radio is still using MP2, with which it started in the
mid-90s. Indeed, some users are particularly angry because they bought
internet radios and hi-fi streamers to get higher quality sound than
they could get from DAB.

Read the full Guardian article at
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/askjack/2015/mar/05/new-internet-radio-listen-bbc-stations

Our thanks to Mike Terry for spotting this item