Radio 3 HD

[PJPJ]

It's now fixed.... though it did cut out and had to be restarted.

I wonder why it's taken all day to rectify the problem.

[Bryn]

Thanks for that tip-off PJPJ, just in time for Bolero.

Hmm, looks like they might be trying to pretend it never happened. Not only do my responses to Rupert Brun appear to have been removed from the relevant blog, but his, and the one he was in turn responding seem to have gone too.

[johnb]

Even odder - what should be the normal iPlayer live stream seems to be streamed at 320 kbps mp3 with Triode's plugin!

Although it was labelled as mp3 by Squeezebox and RMC the stream was actually aac 320 kbps.

[OldTechie]

There's the same problem on the standard player too.

Rather oddly the 320 kbp AAC feed - which you can access in iTunes using the 'Radio' entry then 'Classical' in 'Library' is fine.

Thanks for the iTunes suggestion Steve. I could not test that yesterday when the main feed was broken because the Apple web server reported an error when I tried to download it. I had built my own app to avoid having it playing in a browser that I would close by mistake. I think iTunes is a much better solution - I had always ignored iTunes because I thought it was all about Apple trying to sell me things from their store.

One difference between the iTunes feed and the normal Flash one is that they use different content delivery networks. iPlayer (and web-selected radio 3 HD) gererally seems to use Akamai for all live feeds and Limelight for play-it-again feeds. The Radio 3 High link in iTunes also uses Limelight. So maybe it was Akamai that was in trouble.

On Bryn's dissappearing blog comments, I had something similar. I reported it at about 08:50 yesterday morning, and got a response at 09:30 containing:

"For those who are referring to sound problems when attempting to listen live or listen again to radio content please note that this is being investigated. Please visit the following announcement for more information on this:

"http://iplayerhelp.external.bbc.co.uk/help/announcements/radio_soundquality"

The page it links to is not there.

I was listening as it broke - and immediately closed and reopened the Flash player object. Amongst the logs emitted by the BBC iPlayer plugin I had...
01:58:09.196 [Player] StreamingService (akamai) connected on: rtmp://92.123.66.52:1935 etc..
so I guess it broke for me at about 01:57:30 on 3rd.

Eric

[OldTechie]

Now I'm confused. The iTunes feed stopped late last night, but works again to day. However, the quality is terrible. I thought it was OK last night, but I did not listen to much of it. It has some strange high frequency artefacts compared to the normal Flash delivery. The iTunes player says it is an AAC stream - but that is derived from the data they have on their sharing site.

It is 320kbps. I started two players, one on each stream, at the same time and they seem to have requested roughly the same quantity of data. Courtesy of Comodo firewall:



Eric

[Stunsworth]

The iTunes feed stopped late last night, but works again to day. However, the quality is terrible. I thought it was OK last night, but I did not listen to much of it. It has some strange high frequency artefacts...

Indeed, it was almost like a rapid flutter echo but only in the high frequencies. I switched to DAB for tonight's prom - which in contrast to some I though was excellent.

[Chris Newman]

I have just received from MORI via iPlayer a questionaire about my experiences with the recent break-up in Radio 3/iPlayer transmission. I said that whilst appreciating a reply an apology would be welcome and suggested that the generic reply e-mails include one that apologises for problem and thanks viwer/listener for letting them know about it (most important for customer relations), that says that the fault has been rectified and that the e-mail is sent once the broadcast is properly resumed rather than several days later after we already know the broadcasts have been back on line. This is not hi-tec, just common sense in keeping listener/viewers informed.