Streaming Media R&D

News

This week, we added new music into the station’s active rotation and spent some time exploring various streaming media methods, plus our store’s weekly sale campaign is in full swing. For more details, read on!

We recently previewed some of the new music heading for the rotation during our Live show last month including works from Neo Sanctum, Antares Enigma, and Akane, all of whom you can find new music from in the active rotation. Additionally, we’re working on adding music from Rolling Contact, Medicine Faktory, and more in the coming weeks.

Behind the scenes, we’ve been tinkering around with a few different streaming media technologies and standards to learn more about streaming media in general and how we might be able to apply our learnings to the station and beyond. Last year, we worked on enabling HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) for the radio station to improve compatibility with Apple devices and software, but playback issues in Safari remain. The easy fix for this is to use a different browser like Chrome, but we still find HLS to be an interesting option that’s worth exploring some more.

Next to HLS, we’ve also looked into DASH (Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP) somewhat. Both of these are often thought of as standards for delivering video over the internet, but they have applications for audio as well. Where DASH attempts to be a more open and flexible standard, Apple has stubbornly refused to implement it into their products. There are software implementations that allow for HLS to be used outside the Apple-sphere, and as such, it appears that if we want to maximize compatibility across all devices and browsers, HLS is worth investigating.

To be clear, we don’t plan to replace any of our existing streams with HLS endpoints; it wouldn’t really make sense to do so being an adaptive standard with potentially multiple bitrates in one endpoint. We hope to learn more about our options for delivering media to listeners in more ways and on more devices later this year.

Finally, our store is on its third sale week with multiple CDs up to 50% off. Find deals via our socials, or sign up to the thread on Discord for notifications: Discord

That’s all for this week, stay tuned for more new music, and thanks for listening!

[Knowledge #194]

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