Phasing out 24-56kb MP3 streams

We're going to be phasing out our lower bitrate MP3 streams in 2010, and replace them with aacPlus feeds. 24-32k MP3 streams will become 32k aacPlus streams, which sound so much better than the existing 32k streams. 56k MP3 streams will become 64k aacPlus streams.

Eventually, we'll offer 32k and 64k aacPlus streams for all our channels, 128k MP3 streams for compatibility, and 32kb Windows Media streams.

iTunes 9 now has full support for aacPlus (AAC-HE) streams, and this was the main player that didn't support it. Since 1/3-1/2 of all our traffic is people listening in iTunes, this was something that held us back from making more of a switch to aacPlus before now.

We will also be adding Flash-based streaming this year, which will work well for many people in office settings where they can't install a media player.

The listener numbers for the low bitrate MP3s has drastically fallen over the last year, and I can't think of any reason to keep the low-bitrate MP3 streams running. If you think we should for some reason, leave a comment and let me know.

I'm hoping that we'll get more adoption of the 64kb aacPlus streams which frankly sound as good or better than the 128k MP3 streams.

Happy 2010!